Blade Runner Enhanced is a disaster, not a remake
When I got my first 4K TV, the first movie to grace the lovely new screen was Blade Runner 2049. It’s worth watching at any resolution, but I had high expectations – and they were brutally trampled right away.it looks like horrible. Cheap and artificial, like I’m watching on the fringes of budget dramas. I think maybe I just have to get used to it and my eyes will get used to it eventually. It does look great when nothing is moving. I’m lying to myself.
After a bit of self-deception, I awoke for a while and finally checked the settings, and of course I found that I had become the latest victim of motion smoothing. The villain who decides to have it enabled by default must hate movies and all who watch them. But the moment I turned it off, I had a nice TV that I could enjoy the way Ryan Gosling should have enjoyed it—with a slightly slower frame rate.
God, I wish it was that easy to fix everything with Blade Runner Enhanced.
Nightdive’s remake immediately feels like a motion-smoothed movie. The cutscenes were all bumped up to 60 fps, and the results were jarring, reminiscent of soap operas rather than movie sci-fi.
Like the rest of the game, they were upgraded, but instead of enhancing Blade Runner, it ended up smudging all the smaller details and cleaning up the grime. What remains are recollections of the original look and atmosphere, obscured over time.
Nightdive does not have access to source code (opens in new tab), which delayed the remaster while the team reverse-engineered the original. This greatly limits what Nightdive can do, but doing nothing is better than what we end up with. The artistic intent was completely ignored, which caused massive damage, ruining every scene.
When Ray McCoy got out of the car before his first crime scene of the night, the neon lights above the pet store flashed so fiercely that you could barely make out the name, although admittedly it always fancy. Meanwhile, the cordon is completely illegible for a different reason – the red letters are now smeared on a black background by the child’s chubby fingers. Something big goes wrong here. Maybe that’s what Ray should investigate.
Meanwhile, the cop looking for the robot looks utterly out of place, illuminated by his own sun against the gloomy black background. I’m impressed that Ray can do wonders now, but it’s a little distracting.
Ray and interactive NPCs always look different from background characters, which has one feature: it’s easy to tell who you should click. But now they appear to be superimposed on the scene, completely separate from the rest of the world. Lighting up like this, there are a lot of imperfections that I would never have discovered otherwise.
This is especially evident when Ray arrives in Chinatown, a previously striking location that now looks horrific due to the unnatural dynamism of the character models, which was not affected by the scene’s dramatic lighting and ever-present fog .
While Blade Runner always had some ugly visual quirks, they gave it some gruff character that I now find myself missing. For the most part, it’s a rare game that still impresses me after years of playing it, years after my first attempt to hunt down some replicants. Its unique style — at least for a game — has made it look fresh and compelling over the decades. It’s gone now.
Look what they did to poor Ray’s lovely apartment.
It’s been etched in my memory for decades, but now you can’t even make out the Mesoamerican tiles that elevate it beyond a dingy Art Deco bachelor pad. In this screenshot, you’ll also notice one of the few things that can really be considered “enhancements”: subtitles. This immediately makes Blade Runner easier to pick up, but why oh why do they have to look so ugly?
Existing fonts were also pushed aside, so now the interface also looks terrible. This reminds us that typography is as much a part of art direction as lighting, and again we see the original artistic intent being completely ignored. Menus are more functional now, of course, but it shouldn’t come at the expense of form; they should work together.
Also introduced new bugs. At the first crime scene, when you click on a destination, Ray won’t move unless that destination is something he can interact with. Audio is also sometimes interrupted during conversations. When you pick up an item, it stays on the screen so you can get a better idea of your catch, but now it’s gone in a millisecond. At least, you can still check them out in the lead list. None of this is too shocking, but when stacked on top of all the other issues, it’s even harder to ignore.
I’m excited to play one of my favorite adventure games again, but I’m done – it’s so disappointing. This is an inferior version and should be avoided unless you desperately want to play it on the console where it first appeared now. The previous version of ScummVM on GOG has also been removed from the store, although it is at least bundled with the new version. However, that’s not the case on Steam, so don’t bother with that version.
Even with the story and mechanics intact, it’s lost too much memorable stuff. The atmosphere, the art, and Westwood’s work to bring the moody world of cinema to life have all been canceled. These things have kept me recommending this adventure game to anyone in the market over the years. I appreciate Nightdive’s mission to preserve classic games, but it’s doing the opposite here. Without the source code, the project probably shouldn’t have been approved in the first place.