Blade Runner Getting First Video Game In 25 Years
Blade Runner Labyrinth from Annapurna Interactive is set between the two movies.
Annapurna Interactive, the publisher credited with the game of the year candidate The Stray, has announced that it’s currently working on a new Blade Runner game—the first Blade Runner game after the point-and-click adventure from 1997.
According to VGC, the announced Blade Runner 2033: Labyrinth is the first original Blade Runner game in 25 years, and it will narratively take place between the original 1982 movie and its 2017 sequel Blade Runner 2049. As per the game’s publisher, the narrative is set in a dystopian Los Angeles after the Blackout hits, but other than a teaser trailer for the new game, no other details have been revealed about the game, except for the fact that it will be developed by Annapurna’s internal studio, led by Chelsea Hash—known for Solar Ash and What Remains of Edith Finch.
The new, in-house studio working on the announced Blade Runner game is collaborating with the Blade Runner 2049 studio, Alcon Interactive Group, which is currently working on a new Blade Runner television/streaming series for Amazon Prime. We know that the game is set to launch on PC and all current-gen home gaming consoles. Annapurna Interactive hasn’t mentioned the previous-gen hardware or the Nintendo Switch handheld, but that still doesn’t mean that the game won’t launch on those platforms—the recent success of Hogwarts Legacy proves that the previous-gen is still pretty much alive.
And that’s where all the juicy details about the upcoming Blade Runner game end; Annapurna has proven to be quite capable of outputting great games ever since the company was formed in 2016, after which it released critically acclaimed hits back-to-back, so we have no doubts that the upcoming Blade Runner will be a fantastic release. It’s particularly interesting because the last Blade Runner game for the PC was the aforementioned point-and-click adventure by Westwood Studios, which was released in 1997.
That particular game was subsequently remastered in 2022 for the PC, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch, following the success of the Blade Runner 2049 movie. However, the Enhanced Edition of the game wasn’t so enhanced, and the players openly complained about the poor graphics associated with the game. That isn’t all that surprising, considering the title’s age, but the “enhanced” graphics were actually worse than those of the original release, and the remaster ended up as number 10 on the worst games of 2022 list on Metacritic.
Blade Runner 2033: Labyrinth still doesn’t have a release date, and considering that we just saw a pretty great and nicely detailed teaser trailer, it’s safe to assume that the game is in early active development. We shouldn’t expect a release date to drop before Annapurna releases a gameplay trailer, which might be months, if not a whole year, away. However, we reiterate that the game will be available on both the PC and all major consoles—an Xbox platform might be an exception, considering that The Stray was released only on PlayStation, macOS, and Microsoft Windows.
