BLADE RUNNER Enhanced edition (PS4)

Flashback to 1999. I am working at Dinamic multimedia as a beta tester. One of the (not so many) perks was to get free games. The company not only produced but also distributed for others, so actually you could get a decent amount of titles. One of them was Bladerunner, the videogame. However, the graphic adventure bubble had exploded some years earlier, and at that point they´ve become a niche segment. I didn´t care for the game, and forgot it on a shelf

Fastforward to 2018. During those years the game gained some sort of cult status (it might be the first adventure with different endings according to your decisions). Then I read some news about Bladerunner getting a console version. I now identify as a neo-noir aficionado in all its variations (movies, TV, videogames), I am sometimes taken by nostalgia and definitively a Bladerunner fan, so I started tracking this enhanced edition project via internet

Another fastforward, this time to 2022. Apparently the project was problematic, the team lost the original data and had to reverse-engineer everything, took longer than expected and so on. But eventually they released it, so I got myself a digital copy

Well, it´s definitively a half-cooked game. It is plagued by bugs - sometimes minor, but also many majors - and overall it doesn´t feel like the new features (graphic improvements in particular) add much to the experience. Menus and controls are still very much 90s and mouse-based, and the game has the typical issues of old-school graphic adventures: Pixel searching and lack of leading, meaning you are often forced to re-visit all locations and re-talk to all NPCs to find what is the next step you´re missing

On the plus side, if you either like Bladerunner or neo-noir in general it still retains the charm of playing in that Sci-Fi setting, it´s a brand new story (takes place simultaneously with the events of the 1982 movie) and if you use an online walkthrough as a support tool it can be reasonably entertaining

So in summary, only for real fans either of Bladerunner of the genre. But if you are, it´s pretty much a must