It’s been quite a while since we had a Blade Runner game on PC—roughly 25 years, in fact, since Westwood Studio’s 1997 action adventure Blade Runner arrived. Prior to that, there was only the Blade Runner side-scroller from 1985 for the Commodore 64.
Weird that there are a zillion Star Wars and Aliens games, but only two Blade Runner games, isn’t it?
Well, we’re finally going to get another Blade Runner game, as announced by publisher Annapurna Interactive today. It’s called Blade Runner 2033: Labyrinth, and as you can tell by the date it’s set between the events of the original film (which took place in 2019) and Blade Runner 2049. Interestingly, it’ll be the first game to be developed in-house by Annapurna, too. You can check out the reveal trailer above.
It’s a little hard to tell what kind of game Blade Runner 2033: Labyrinth actually is from the teaser, but its Steam page lists “adventure” and “investigation” as tags, two things I like to do in game. It takes place after The Blackout, an event in 2022 where a nuclear warhead was detonated over Los Angeles, wiping out the servers of the replicant manufacturer Tyrell Corporation. Perhaps that’s the reason for recalling the Blade Runner in the trailer, to sift through any remaining data as he seems to be doing. The 2030s are when the Wallace Corporation began making new advances in replicant technology, so maybe he’s been hired to find some critical information. But that’s just a guess.
There’s also no release date or window listed: Annapurna says only that “more details about the game will be revealed in the coming months.”
This isn’t the only recent Blade Runner news: last year saw a disastrous remaster of the original Blade Runner game, a new Blade Runner tabletop RPG, and the announcement of a Blade Runner TV series coming to Amazon. With all that going on, I guess it’s no surprise we’re finally getting a new game.