Annapurna Interactive has revealed the first game they will be making through their internal studio, and surprisingly, it’s a license.
Blade Runner 2033: Labyrinth is set between the 1982 film and 2017’s Blade Runner 2049. Annapurna has not officially announced platforms or a release date, but have put up a Steam page. This is the description of the game on their page:
“Lots of people lost things in the Black Out.
I was lucky, I just lost a job.
But now they want me back.”
From Annapurna Interactive, Blade Runner 2033: Labyrinth brings the revered franchise back to games for the first time in 25 years.
Set between the original film and 2049, Blade Runner 2033 takes place after the events of the Black Out and asks: what does a Blade Runner do when there are no Replicants left to hunt?”
The trailer hints at our detective, Cain Deckard, walking across the city, and doing his investigations using computers and seemingly looking at video footage.
An interesting detail is that the city seems completely uninhabited at the time of the Black Out. There is still power running across the city, presumably from backups, but the city certainly doesn’t resemble even the bustling underworld envisioned by Syd Mead, Ridley Scott, and others.
The trailer already invites questions such as what happened in the Black Out? Was the city abandoned, like the Mayans did hundreds of years ago? Or are they hiding in underground bunkers?
The trailer also hints that everything is not what it seems, but in a different way than we had known before. If the film had us questioning who was truly human and who was not, now we don’t know if we can trust everything we see with our own eyes.
As reported by Video Games Chronicle, Annapurna had already been a publisher of small games for a few years when they decided to start their own internal studio in 2020. Two years after that, Annapurna hired Chelsea Hash as game director, alongside some other developers who also worked on Solar Ash. Hash is also known for What Remains of Edith Finch and Radiohead’s Kid A Mnesia Exhibition.
Blade Runner 2033: Labyrinth is also only the second game ever made in the Blade Runner franchise, but promises to take the world in a completely new direction. This game might not be for everyone, but so was the original Blade Runner movie.
