News broke earlier this week thatSupermassive Games was working on a Blade Runner game. Emphasis onwas, because the game has already been canceled after entering pre-production last September. Blade Runner: Time To Live would have launched in 2027 on current-gen consoles as well as the next-gen Xbox and PlayStation. For fans of cyberpunk and cinematic, story-driven games, this is basically the burning of Alexandria.
Time To Live would have brought together two of my interests — cyberpunk and story-driven games — and it’s a bummer to see it retired before it could live.
Cyberpunk Is A Genre With Few True Classics
Cyberpunk is an interesting genre because, as seminal as some works are, there aren’t many (any?) that perfectly show off what it can do.The Matrix,Blade Runner, and Akira are the best movies to emerge from the genre, but they all only capture one small piece of the pie.
Blade Runner has the perfect mood, but its detective story is never especially captivating. Akira is gorgeous, but much of the movie doesn’t feel like cyberpunk, especially its creature feature conclusion. And The Matrix is a euphoric action movie, but it doesn’t have any of the cityscapes that fans go to the genre for. Like blind men touching an elephant, we’ve gotten the snake-like trunk, the spear-like tusk, and the pillar-like legs, but never the full animal.
I have this same complaint about games in the genre.Cyberpunk 2077’s Night City is gorgeous to look at, but has too many locked doors to be exciting to explore.Final Fantasy 7only devotes those first few hours to Midgar, and even in the Remake, it spends too much time in same-y green and gray corridors to fully nail the colorful appeal of cyberpunk.
So, whenever a new cyberpunk game comes out, it becomes the vessel I shove all my hopes and dreams into. Okay, that’s a slight exaggeration, but I do hold games in this genre to a higher standard because they start with such a massive aesthetic leg up. Even more so if they’re using the actual Blade Runner IP and evenmore so if they’remade by the team behindUntil Dawn, one of the greatest horror games ever made.
Until Dawn: Deckard Edition
Cyberpunk might be the most cinematic genre. It brings together all the things that look incredible on screen: smoke, fog, rain, neon, monolithic cityscapes, gleaming metal, and cars. If you were making a list of the top ten most cinematic things, at least five of those would make the list. So, Supermassive — which makes really cinematic games, complete with well-known movie actors like Will Poulter and Jessie Buckley — would have been a great fit. Especially if the Blade Runner IP came with a bump in budget. Previous Supermassive games like Man of Medan weren’t wholly successful, but could have been something special with a little more polish.
When Supermassive is firing on all cylinders, the results can be spectacular. Until Dawn is a brilliantly moody horror game that takes inspiration from the slashers of the ’80s and ’90s. It’s wonderfully schlocky and a blast to play with friends. It’s easy to imagine that studio just as effectively nailing the interesting lore and visual tropes of the universe established by Philip K. Dick, Ridley Scott, and Denis Villeneuve. As someone drawn to games for the mood of their worlds as much as anything, I can imagine it being an immaculate space to occupy.
Supermassive is really prolific, so I’m sure the team involved is moving on to another cool project. But still, it’s hard not to be bummed out that all those quick-time events in gorgeous, neon-drenched cityscapes have been lost like tears in rain.
