20 Remakes and Remasters That Are Worse Than The Original

Like Escape from Butcher Bay, movie tie-in game Blade Runner made the wise choice of sidestepping the film’s narrative and carving out its own story in the same universe. Developed by Westwood Studios and, perplexingly, released some fifteen years after the film, the game is set in 2019 LA, and follows Ray McCoy, a detective hunting a group of dangerous replicants in much the same way Harrison Ford’s Rick Deckard does in the film.

Blade Runner was an early adopter of 3D character rendering, alongside the rarely seen but innovative device of having events in the game world progress in real-time. And, despite being in the normally tedious point-and-click format, it’s surprisingly good, in particular thanks to several randomised elements that give it strong replay value.

The remaster, Blade Runner: Enhanced Edition, was handled by Nightdive Studios, and arrived on Windows, Switch, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One in 2022, but any hopes of stoking some nostalgia while enjoying a heightened gaming experience on modern tech were misplaced. The game’s graphics range from being slightly sharper, to being the same, to being weirdly blurry and unrefined throughout – with the result being that it’s dimmer, inconsistent and looks pretty iffy most of the time. For a point-and-click game, getting the visuals wrong is tantamount to destroying the game, but the issues don’t stop there, because the game was riddled with bugs and glitches on launch, and no autosave to rescue you.