Annapurna Interactive has officially revealed a new video game based on the classic, iconic Blade Runner franchise that’s currently in the works. The new video game is titled Blade Runner 2033: Labyrinth, and it will be the first in-house game developed at Annapurna Interactive. The game publisher first announced the game at the company’s 2023 Interactive Showcase. You can check out the newly released teaser trailer for the upcoming title below.
BLADE RUNNER 2033: LABYRINTH CURRENTLY IN THE WORKS AT ANNAPURNA INTERACTIVE
There aren’t many details yet on the new title. The teaser trailer reveals a lone figure in Los Angeles referencing the in-universe event known as the “Blackout” that took place in 2022 in the Blade Runner universe. The new game looks to be set in the dystopian Los Angeles in the year 2033.
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The second Blade Runner movie, released in 2017, Blade Runner 2049, is set about 16 years after the events of this game. The male character featured in the teaser says, “Lots of people lost things in the Blackout. I was lucky, I just lost a job. But now they want me back.”
This is speculation, but the figure in the teaser appears to potentially be a Blade Runner, and it looks like he might be coming back for some sort of investigation related to Replicants, bio-engineered, synthetic beings with enhanced physical abilities. The character appears to have an LAPD badge, so he might be some type of an officer or a Blade Runner in service of the LAPD.
The teaser doesn’t indicate what type of genre the game will be or what type of gameplay it will feature, but it does look to be a narrative and story-focused game. There’s also a lot of familiar imagery from the films and its spinoffs, including the large towering buildings in the dystopia LA, and the flying Spinner cars. Annapurna Interactive hasn’t too many details other than that the company is serving as both developer and publisher.
Per IGN, development on the title is being led by Chelsea Hash, who previously worked on Solar Ash and What Remains of Edith Finch. Solar Ash was an adventure platforming title, and What Remains of Edith Finch was a first-person exploration game.
Speaking to IGN on the upcoming title, Hash stated, “BR2033 is very much a narrative game, so I can lean on my learnings from Edith Finch often. On the other side, projects like Solar Ash and our work in the interactive music space gave us incredible love of wielding advanced graphics as gameplay tools. Our desire to bend a wide array of disciplines as expressive tools will definitely be present in the final game.”
Hash also confirmed to IGN that the new game is mainly focused on the film universe of the franchise, but the developer does respect the source material from the original novella. She is also a player of the famous 1997 video game, noting that the two titles have some of the same “shared themes” and the same setting.
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Per IGN, Hash said the development team for the title is “fairly small,” and they’ve already been working on Labyrinth for a little over a year building tools for the project and the team itself. The team is reportedly honing in on the “world, timeline, and perspective of the films.” Hash added to IGN, “I’m really interested in surfacing details of what life is like for the people in the Blade Runner world in 2033, and we’re going to draw out as much of the mythos as we can through those people.”
This will be the first Blade Runner video game in over 25 years. The last game was the famous 1997 point-and-click adventure game developed by Westwood Studios and published by Virgin Interactive for Microsoft Windows back in 1997. The game depicted a story that actually was framed as happening parallel to the events of the classic 1982 movie directed by Ridley Scott.
Blade Runner 2033: Labyrinth does not yet have a release date. The game is currently available to wishlist on Steam. Besides the game, there is also the recent Blade Runner: Black Lotus anime series, that is currently available to stream subbed and dubbed on Crunchyroll. The anime is set in 2032, one year before the events of the game. Alcon Entertainment is also developing a new live-action television series spinoff of the franchise, Blade Runner 2099, for Amazon Prime Video.
What do you think of the news? Do you think a new Blade Runner video game is a great idea? Would you play this new iteration of the franchise? Let us know your thoughts on the news on The Illuminerdi’s Twitter.
SOURCE: Annapurna Interactive, IGN
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