Where did they go wrong with this? How did they go wrong with this? Taking a classic game and remastering it is Nightdive’s specialty, so taking the classic Westwood-developed Blade Runner game and giving it a facelift for modern PCs and consoles should have been a recipe for success. And yet instead the results we were given are a complete disaster and disservice to the classic.
Blade Runner was the first 3D adventure game and was very much ahead of its time. Whereas most adventure games do not have much replay value, Blade Runner had multiple routes to take, a randomized plot that changed things up, and decisions to make that influenced what kind of personality the characters would have. These were things that Adventure Games just were not doing at the time, and still do not for that matter, and the game wove its ever-changing narrative into the plot of the movie as it happened.
When Nightdive announced a remaster called the Enhanced Edition, many were excited. After all, Nightdive has done some amazing work with games like Quake, the classic Doom ports, Powerslave: Exhumed and so on, which meant the game had a great pedigree behind it. This is ironically what made the results so disappointing since the Enhanced Edition is so far from what Nightdive’s usual quality is like.
The Enhanced Edition was promised to improve on the game and look better than ever, but the game actually looks far worse than the 1997 original. The music is of a lower quality than before and lacks many international language versions. If that is not bad enough, the game also has plenty of new bugs, minor and big, that were not in the original game, which greatly hurts the experience.
But there was nothing to be done, right? After all, Nightdive had to build this port from scratch with new code since the original source code was lost and this was the best option it seemed. Well, no it wasn’t the best option and isn’t even the best option available at the time as another port had been released a few years earlier on GOG to widespread acclaim.
This port was made by volunteers working for free using ScummVM, and spent countless hours working to restore the game and get it running. This version fixed bugs from the original game, added a subtitle option and even had a mode to restore cut content. Nightdive has now packaged the ScummVM port on Steam to make up for the poor reception, but it also shows that the Enhanced Edition never needed to be made like this and does not help those who are playing on consoles.
There is no way to recommend the game as is. This is just a catastrophe and a blight on Nightdive’s good name. Check out the ScummVM version on PC if you want to play a good version of the classic and avoid this one at all costs.
Disclaimer: A review key was provided
