The “Enhanced Edition” of the awesome Blade Runner adventure game from Westwood Studios was just released on steam as well as on consoles. Unfortunately, it’s a mess. As with so many of the recent re-issues of beloved classics, it appears to be little more than a cynical cash grab. The graphics and all-important mood of the game have been destroyed by blurry “upresing” and audio bugs. I would give Nightdive Studios the benefit of the doubt here, except for the fact that their “fix” for this problem was to effectively steal the work that fan volunteers had done to port Blade Runner to ScummVM and make it only available behind their paywall. On the up side, this just makes getting ahold of the ScummVM version legally and for free a little more difficult. I’m going to detail that process for you here.
Since this was obviously such a hasty hack of a fix, Nightdive took no precautions to protect the ScummVM version of the game with any type of DRM. This means that you can simply buy Blade Runner: Enhanced Edition on steam, and copy over one folder, and then it will be divorced from the steam version of the game entirely. This will leave you with the great DRM free ScummVM version almost ready to play. Here are some more in-depth instructions:
- Buy the game on steam and install it
- Right click on the game in your steam library >Manage > Browse local files
- Drag the folder called “Classic” to your desktop
- Now you might as well rename the folder on your desktop to “Blade Runner” because that’s what it is
- Open the “Blade Runner” folder then the “ScummVM” folder
- Run scummvm.exe
- Click “Add Game”
- Navigate to the “Blade Runner” folder on your desktop
- Click “Choose”
- It should ask you now if you’d like to add the original version or the one with cut content. To be honest, I don’t know the difference, but I did the one with cut content and it’s been working fine. Also you can add both.
- Now select the game in the game list and hit “Start”
- ScummVM may say it’s not entirely supported, but just say to start it anyway.
- Enjoy.
Of course, you are now left with an inferior version of the game in your steam library that you paid $10 for. Fortunately steam is very understanding in these matters, and will gladly work with you to alleviate that situation.