With its genre defining world-building, neo-noir detective beats and damaged characters all underscored by a stirring, ruinous futurist aesthetic (not to mention Vangelis evocative and timelessly melancholic score), Ridley Scott’s seminal Blade Runner has long earned its place as not just an all-time great of the big screen, but also as the godfather of the cyberpunk genre.
Given the wealth of enduring love that Ridley Scott’s 1982 science fiction effort rightly enjoys, it should come as little surprise that there are actually a decent handful of quality PC games that engagingly emulate different aspects of Blade Runner. So without further ado, here are some of the best PC games that are like Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner.
Blade Runner (Classic)
Though it’s somewhat on the nose, it shouldn’t be too much of a revelation to discover that Blade Runner is the video game that boasts the closest kinship with Ridley Scott’s motion picture. Originally developed in 1997 by the long and sadly defunct Westwood Studios, Blade Runner was a point and click detective adventure that deeply immersed players in the eternal twilight of 2019 Los Angeles, enticing them to track down a group of Replicants that appear to have gone on a killing spree. Taking in iconic settings such as the Bradbury building, the Dragon Market and more besides, Blade Runner was an excellent point and click offering that while it perhaps hewed a little too closely to the source material, nonetheless was as close to playing Ridley Scott’s seminal 1982 movie as you’re ever going to get.
A remastered version of Blade Runner, courtesy of usually excellent retro remastering outfit Nightdive Studios, released in June 2022 under the moniker Blade Runner: Enhanced Edition and well, it isn’t great. Despite a substantial patching effort that has been brought to bear since its release, Blade Runner: Enhanced Edition still suffers from a number of bugs that weren’t present in the original release, not to mention a visual ‘upgrade’ that is anything but. Akin to the motto of the Tyrell Corporation, commerce, clearly, was the goal here – and little else.
Observer: System Redux
A resolutely dark and grim cyberpunk detective adventure from Bloober Team, the same studio that brought us horror titles such as Layers of Fear and Blair Witch, Observer System Redux casts players as neural police detective that must jack into the fractured and tortured minds of others to unravel a murderous conspiracy. Beyond the obvious similarities with the detective work and broader cyberpunk setting, Observer: System Redux does a particularly decent job of channelling the visual aesthetic of Ridley Scott’s opus. With constant streaming rain and a nighttime setting that is frequently punctuated by the same sort of extravagant lighting that set Blade Runner apart from its big screen contemporaries, Observer: System Redux certainly looks the part.
Observer: System Redux also gets a commendable shoutout for casting late (and sorely missed) actor Rutger Hauer as both the likeness and the voice of the primary protagonist, not least because it conjures a sort of irony that Roy Batty himself is now taking on the role of the world weary detective that Harrison Ford did all the way back in 1982.
The Ascent
Though on the face of it, The Ascent with its fast-paced dungeon crawler combat would seem to have little in common with the more ponderous, thoughtful beats of Blade Runner, it manages to nail two key similarities with Ridley Scott’s genre defining flick. The first, is that
The Ascent paints a compelling picture about what the audience would see if Blade Runner took a deeper glimpse into the myriad areas of Los Angeles, providing players with a painstakingly detailed neon jungle that is awash with blazing signage, flying cars and crowds of downtrodden city dwellers.
Next, it can be easy to forget just how much oomph the firearms in Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner actually had. Deckard’s iconic blaster was a hand-cannon in the truest sense and carried with it the sound of splitting thunder each time he would fire off a round. Neon Giant, the developers behind The Ascent, have clearly taken this to heart, not least because every single firearm in the game has the sort of roaring audibles and satisfying heft that every other top down shooter should be jealous of.
Cloudpunk
While Cloudpunk would seem to mimic the dark, rainy nights of Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner with due aplomb, it also represents something of a unique take on things. Rather than putting players in the shoes of a conflicted detective or an android in the middle of an existential crisis, Cloudpunk instead casts players as Raina, an employee of Cloudpunk, a sketchy delivery outfit embedded in the city of Nivalis. Tasked with making a range of do-not-ask deliveries to all manner of shady clients from her trusty hover car, Raina soon uncovers a vast web of deception into which rogue AI, deadly androids and more all find themselves caught in.
As Pris saunters towards the Bradbury building in Ridley Scott’s movie and glances up into the sky, observing the massive advertising blimp and the criss-crossing flying cars that soar overhead, it certainly triggers the imagination. Indeed, Cloudpunk is essentially what I would imagine the ‘sky roads’ of Blade Runner’s 2019 Los Angeles would look and feel like, with a city that just begs to be explored as airborne cars screech and turn in the rain-dappled night skies all the while an elevated urban sprawl, decked out in pulsating neon, speeds on by.
Cyberpunk 2077
Though perhaps of all the games on this list, Cyberpunk 2077 would seem to bear the least resemblance from visual perspective to Blade Runner, what with its sun-kissed city sprawls and resolutely futuristic architecture, the underpinning existential struggle and themes of attempting to ‘perfect’ the human race still boast a palpable kinship to Ridley Scott’s cyberpunk masterpiece.
More than that, Cyberpunk 2077 tugs at the wellspring of imagination by providing a tantalising glimpse at what the world of Blade Runner might look like beyond the boundaries of its frame, as CD Projekt RED’s recently redeemed epic RPG invites players to shape their own story in a massive, bleak metropolis teeming with tragedy, opportunity and hubris. If someone ever decided to make an open world action RPG based directly on Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, chances are that other than the occasional solar intrusion, it would look a lot like Cyberpunk 2077.
