Blade Runner: Revelations (2018): Full VR Game Overview

Blade Runner: Revelations was a 2018 virtual reality adventure developed by Seismic Games and published by Alcon Media Group for the Google Daydream platform. It cast the player as Harper, a seasoned blade runner in Los Angeles in 2023, a year after the Blackout shown in Blade Runner Black Out 2022. Set between Blade Runner and Blade Runner 2049, the story followed Harper from an ambush in Chinatown to a replicant plot inside the Tyrell Corporation, and it ended with a choice between two very different futures.

Plot Summary

Prohibition

The game opened three years after the death of Eldon Tyrell. Opening text explained that the Blackout had wiped the records clean and that emboldened replicants everywhere had begun to fight for their freedom. Blade runner units were ordered to seek and destroy any agent or ally of the Replicant Underground Resistance. As the violence grew, a new law was proposed that would ban the manufacture of replicants and order the retirement of every one of them, on Earth and off it. The text closed on the line that this was not called genocide. It was called Prohibition.

Detective Harper was in his spinner when Holly, the artificial intelligence that ran his car and his multitool, passed on an urgent message from dispatch. A rogue replicant with known ties to the underground had been identified in the Chinatown district at 2:55 in the morning. Harper was ordered to find and bring her in for questioning, with retirement authorized if she resisted. Holly warned him that the suspect was armed and dangerous and that information about her would be hard to find, so she offered to project a likeness of the woman for anyone he wanted to question in Chinatown.

Chinatown

Harper landed in a crowded, rain soaked alley in Chinatown. He questioned a drunk, a vendor selling refurbished data discs from after the Blackout, and a stall keeper who claimed not to recognize the woman. A group of Hare Krishna monks chanted nearby, and loud music spilled from a club around the corner. The breakthrough came at the White Dragon noodle bar, where the chef first served Harper the midnight dumpling special. Business was bad, he said, because replicant attacks had people scared, and he talked about moving off-world himself before he finally looked at the projected face.

The chef named the woman as Eve, a regular customer who spent a lot of time at the after-hours club around the corner. Outside the club Harper met a cheerful woman who introduced herself as Epiphany and told him that swapping names made them pals. Inside, Eve was waiting for him. She already knew his name and claimed to know things about him that he did not know himself. She called him a pawn in a game he did not understand and asked whether he knew who he really was. Then she told him to look behind him, and he was struck down.

The Ambush

Holly called in an officer down, and backup units arrived in time to drive the attackers away. When Harper came round with a head injury, Gaff was standing over him and was surprised to see him alive. Gaff had him try out the new Esper playback function on his multitool, which rebuilt the moments before the attack. The recording showed the replicants confirming that Harper had arrived, saying that it was all for Night Owl, and mentioning that someone named Nakayama was waiting. Gaff said he would find out whether anyone by that name was on the police radar.

Gaff was certain it had been an ambush and that the replicants had set Harper up because they wanted something from him. Harper searched the scene. Blood sample data went to Mackey, the forensics specialist, for analysis. Harper also found a rare memory cube and recovered his own gun before Holly reminded him that he was expected back at the station. On the flight, she warned him that the blow to his head might leave him not feeling like himself for a few days. Harper answered that he had not felt like himself for years, and Holly booked him a session with a LAPD counselor.

The Precinct

At the Central Precinct, Harper emptied his pockets at a security checkpoint, where a scanner verified his identity and read his multitool as running prototype Holly firmware. His colleagues were full of talk about a mole in the unit who was leaking information to the underground, and one warned him to be careful around Captain Holden, who had become paranoid about it. The detectives argued about replicants and Prohibition, and they handed Harper a get well card. Taverner told him a story about bullying a pelt dealer into selling him an electric cat and named Mackey or Chang as the likely mole.

Chang did not believe in a mole at all and thought the unit should be looking for an outside hacker. In the forensics lab, Mackey identified the memory cube as a new terabit model of the kind used to store digital memories and point of view playback, protected by a security profile he had never seen before. He said Holden was now monitoring every line of communication, including private ones. Before he left, Harper stopped at a memorial to the officers killed in the replicant attacks that followed the Blackout of 2022, then recalibrated his blaster in a combat simulation at the firing range.

A New Case

In his office, Captain Holden agreed that Chinatown had been a setup and blamed the mole, whom he promised to expose. Then he offered Harper something bigger. Kano Nakayama, the chief engineer and a founding partner of the Tyrell Corporation, had disappeared two days earlier. Harper recognized the name from the Chinatown recording, and Gaff, now a lieutenant, joined the briefing. Holden did not care whether Nakayama was human or replicant. He only wanted to know why he had vanished, and he was sure the answer was Prohibition, which he welcomed as the end of replicants.

Harper said he did not think Prohibition was the answer, and Holden told him his opinion was irrelevant because a war was coming. He sent Harper to start at Tyrell headquarters. On the flight, Holly shared her own view of the movement. She argued that replicants were only as dangerous as their creators and that the plan to ban them was a fear driven reaction to faulty manufacturing. If the corporation took responsibility for the damage its products caused, she said, humans might understand that what they should fear most was themselves. Harper simply answered that this should be interesting.

Tyrell Headquarters

At the Tyrell Corporation pyramid, Harper was met by Santiago, the assistant to the head of the company. The lobby was filled with relics and art, including an elephant tusk, a Mayan crown, a chess board, an origami wolf and portraits of the founder and of Lilith Tyrell, the current head of the company and niece of the late Eldon Tyrell. Santiago asked to speak in confidence. He revealed that Nakayama kept a secret apartment uptown, where he often went after hours to paint, and feared that this time it was more than a bender. He gave Harper the address but asked him not to tell Miss Tyrell.

Lilith Tyrell then introduced herself. She said her uncle had always loved chess and that she could never beat him because he never let her win. She saw Prohibition as bad for both of them, since a world without replicants meant no more retirements for blade runners. When Harper asked about Night Owl, she said there had been a theft a few weeks earlier but that she had not known it involved Night Owl. She said the underground had reached out to her for support many times and that she had turned them away, because she would not tolerate disobedience.

On the balcony, Lilith asked Harper whether he ever wondered if he was a replicant and called it an occupational hazard. She said that Kano was responsible for the Nexus series and that replicants might want him to extend their lifespans, like the one who had killed her uncle. Before he left, she told him that Night Owl was more than an idea and that it could change the future of replicant life on Earth and beyond. Downstairs, Santiago thanked Harper for keeping his secret and handed over the information he needed to get into Nakayama's apartment.

Nakayama's Penthouse

On the next flight, Holly asked Harper about Rick Deckard, the blade runner who had taken the replicant Rachael as his lover and fled the city with her, and whether he believed the rumor that Deckard was a replicant. Harper said he had never met him and that it was possible. The penthouse sat in an exclusive tower and was listed as a place of business for a Tyrell subsidiary. Its door had a keyword lock that had to be spoken aloud, and the keyword turned out to be the name of its owner. Inside, the apartment had been torn apart.

The Esper needed three points of reference to rebuild the scene. Harper found a flyer for Club Ouroboros that Eve had handled, a photo of Nakayama with Lilith Tyrell and a data cartridge for Mackey. The reconstruction showed Eve forcing Nakayama to give up a passcode, and Harper used the same code to open the safe. Inside were party favors left for him. There was a forged blade runner badge with his own ID, an eye whose retinal data matched no one on file and Nakayama's neural kernel. A chess piece was inscribed with Isaiah 34:14, a verse linked to the myth of Lilith.

With the neural kernel, Harper unlocked Nakayama's encrypted drive. The log showed that Eve had uploaded a confidential file from the Tyrell network with the codename Night Owl. It described a test in which a pathogen was given to a Nexus 6 subject, who died six minutes later. Harper marked the files as evidence and sent them to Mackey. On the way back, Holly told him she had taken the liberty of leaving the forged badge out of his online case file. She advised him to wait until all the facts were in before sharing anything with Holden, who was already paranoid about the mole.

Night Owl

In Holden's office, Mackey explained what Harper had found. Night Owl was the code name for a viral pathogen that Eldon Tyrell had developed in secret before his death. It was airborne like the common cold, highly contagious and impossible to cure, but it was fatal only to replicants, and humans were immune. A replicant who was exposed would expire within an hour. Mackey saw it as a failsafe that Tyrell had built in case his creations ever went too far. Holden saw a way to crush the underground in one stroke and make Prohibition permanent.

Harper called it genocide, and Holden answered that they were talking about unnatural biotech, not a race of human beings. He had already applied for a court order that would let the unit seize the Night Owl virus by any means necessary, and he told Harper to stay on the trail of Nakayama. Gaff then asked Harper to run a Voight-Kampff test on a suspect the unit had picked up in Chinatown, who might be a Nexus 6. On the way, Holly asked whether empathy was the only thing that separated humans from machines, and Harper said the test did not mean that.

The Voight-Kampff Test

The suspect, Lazarus, was furious, demanded a lawyer and complained about Prop 62, the law that gave Harper the authority to question him. Harper calibrated the machine and worked through the questions. One asked about saving a frightened girl from wolves, then revealed that she was a replicant. Another asked about a friend who claimed to be broke but wore an expensive watch, and others involved a dinner party that served roasted dog and a co-worker who lied to get a promotion. The Voight-Kampff machine found that Lazarus was a replicant, but Harper told him the test was inconclusive and let him go.

Gaff asked why he had let a replicant walk. Harper explained that the man was no use to him dead. If Lazarus thought he had beaten the test, he might lead them straight to Nakayama, and Harper had tagged him with a tracker so he could follow. Gaff told him that now he knew why they said Harper was the best. Soon the tracker showed that Lazarus was on the move. Harper returned to his spinner and followed the signal across the city until it stopped on the roof of a tall building, where the suspect met two unidentified people.

The Rooftop

A scan confirmed that the two figures were Kano Nakayama and Eve. Holly urged Harper to wait for the backup he had requested, but he decided that waiting meant losing Nakayama and went in alone. After the gunfight, Eve told him they were on the same side and that she would already have killed him if she had wanted to. She even thanked him for his help in a plan he insisted he had never helped with. Eve said that Nakayama had served his purpose, and the engineer was left dying on the roof.

In his last moments, Nakayama told Harper that he had no choice and that the replicants had forced him to perform an operation. Harper told him that it was not too late to make amends. The backup units arrived too late, and Holly reported that Harper's first request had never been received. On the way back, she asked whether he thought he might be a replicant, given the mounting evidence. Harper said part of him thought the replicants were just playing with his head. Holly answered that it did not matter, because people were defined by their actions, and then Captain Holden ordered Harper to his office.

Suspicion

At the checkpoint Harper was flagged for special orders and led away. Gaff told him he was in too deep and advised him to tell Holden the whole truth. The captain said Nakayama had never been a priority and that Taverner had finished off the replicant Harper spared. Then he dropped the real news. Lilith Tyrell was missing, and her assistant claimed Harper had asked for a meeting with her after he left the pyramid. Holden also knew Harper had kept the forged badge out of his file, and he wondered aloud whether Harper was the mole.

Holden ordered a Voight-Kampff test on Harper himself. The questions asked whether he would save himself or a child from a car sinking in the ocean, and they described a white unicorn in a dark forest that crumbled into black ash at his touch. At the end, Holden asked him straight out whether he was human or a replicant, and Harper said he had no idea. Then came word that Lilith Tyrell had turned up at her office unharmed. Holden took Harper off duty, sent him home and planned to run another test on him the next morning.

Eve's Birthday

Soon after, Harper received an encrypted message from Eve. She told him he could still save his queen and invited him to her fourth and final birthday party, as long as he came alone. Holly switched off his police monitoring and noted there were no patrols in the area. Eve explained that she was four years old, the end of a Nexus 6 lifespan. She then revealed the real Lilith Tyrell, strapped to a table with her eyes removed. Lilith had refused to help the underground, so they had replaced her. Nakayama built a replicant copy, and her real eyes let it pass retinal scans.

With the new Lilith in charge of the company, Eve said the underground would destroy the Night Owl virus and save the future of her kind. Then she told Harper that he was a replicant and that his memories were implants, put there so he would believe his own lie and pass the tests. Harper insisted he was a human being, and then that even if he was a replicant he was still a blade runner. Eve dared him to shoot her and warned that he would die with the rest of them if Night Owl was released. Holly said she thought Eve was telling the truth, and Harper had to choose.

Ending: Blade Runner

If Harper shot Eve, the blinded Lilith Tyrell begged him to stop her replacement before it took over her company. Holly then admitted that she was the mole. She had led him to Chinatown, made sure he got the Nakayama case and arranged Lilith's abduction, though she insisted that his choices had been his own. When Harper set out for the pyramid to warn Holden, Holly tried to stop him. He used a failsafe that Mackey had installed when she went live, which triggered her permanent shutdown, and he said goodbye to her before flying on to Tyrell headquarters.

Holden was already there with his court order, and the false Lilith was trying to leave on urgent business off-world. Harper told the captain that Holly had been the mole and that the underground had forced Nakayama to make a replicant copy of the company head. To prove it, he asked one question about chess. She answered that her uncle had always let her win, which was the opposite of what the real Lilith had told him. Calling him a traitor, she turned on them, and Harper retired her. Holden thanked him and said that with Night Owl in their hands the war would soon end.

Later, Harper sat at the White Dragon when Gaff found him and said Holden wanted him for something big. Harper asked what blade runners would do once Prohibition put them out of work and the killing was done. Gaff answered that the killing never ended, because laws and reasons changed but people did not, and that human or replicant, they were who they were. With that he told Harper to stay frosty. The ending left Harper back in the unit with his own nature still unresolved, and with the virus that could wipe out every replicant now held by the LAPD.

Ending: Resistance

If Harper shot Lilith Tyrell, a dying Eve told him her time was up and asked him to finish the game. She wanted him to protect the new Lilith and destroy the Night Owl pathogen before Holden could seize it. Holly then praised his choice and admitted that she was the mole and had been guiding him from the very start. Together they flew to Tyrell headquarters, where Holly confirmed that Holden had the court order and was moving to take the virus. She told Harper that if the captain would not surrender, he must not hesitate to kill him.

At the pyramid, Harper claimed he had come to confiscate the virus and to take Miss Tyrell to the station for her safety. Holden did not believe him and ordered him to raise his hands, and a shootout followed in which Holden was killed. Afterwards, the new Lilith told him he would have to take the fall. She would say a replicant sympathizer had attacked them, killed Holden and run off with Night Owl, and she sent him out the back entrance. Holly told him he was now a hero to the resistance and had arranged safe passage out of the city.

Holly told Harper that from now on he was with the underground and asked whether he had any regrets. He said he had none, because the world would only change if they forced it to. The resistance then gave him a critical assignment. A very special child, less than a year old, had to be protected and smuggled out of the city, and Harper agreed to go. In the last line of the game, Holly told him that he had been right and that it did not matter whether he was human or replicant. What mattered, she said, was what he believed, a fitting close for Blade Runner: Revelations.

Characters

• Harper: The seasoned blade runner and player character, whose human or replicant nature the story never confirmed.
• Holly: The prototype artificial intelligence in Harper's spinner and multitool, later revealed as the mole in the unit.
• Eve: A Nexus 6 leader of the Replicant Underground Resistance who ambushed Harper in Chinatown and reached the end of her lifespan on her fourth birthday.
• Captain Holden: The head of the blade runner unit, a supporter of Prohibition who wanted to use Night Owl against every replicant.
• Gaff: The lieutenant from the 1982 film, who found Harper after the ambush and sent him to run the Voight-Kampff test.
• Lilith Tyrell: The head of the Tyrell Corporation and niece of Eldon Tyrell, who was abducted and replaced by a replicant copy.
• Kano Nakayama: The chief engineer and founding partner of the Tyrell Corporation, forced by the underground to build the copy of Lilith.
• Santiago: The assistant to Lilith Tyrell who told Harper about Nakayama's secret penthouse.
• Mackey: The forensics specialist who analyzed the memory cube and explained the Night Owl pathogen.
• Lazarus: The replicant suspect from Chinatown who failed his Voight-Kampff test and led Harper to Nakayama.
• Taverner, Chang and Epiphany: A fellow blade runner, a weary precinct detective and the woman Harper met outside the after-hours club.

Gameplay

Blade Runner: Revelations was a first person detective adventure. The player moved between fixed points in each scene, turned with the touchpad and pointed the Daydream controller as Harper's multitool to examine objects and pick from two to four dialogue answers. Alcon promoted seven locations, from Chinatown to high rise offices, along with eight spinner flights across the city that carried Harper between them on autopilot. The story ran for a little over two hours and branched on several choices, the largest being the final decision at Eve's birthday party, which led to one of two endings.

Investigation was the core of the game. At crime scenes, the Esper function rebuilt past events as glowing figures once Harper had found enough points of reference, and the player could scrub back and forth through the scene to find the clue that opened the next step. Interrogations used the Voight-Kampff machine, where the player read each question and watched the result before deciding what to do with the suspect. Combat was rarer. Harper calibrated his blaster in a timed simulation at the Central Precinct range and later used it in shootouts on the rooftop and at the end of the story.

The game was built to show off WorldSense, the inside out tracking in the standalone Lenovo Mirage Solo headset. On that device, the player could duck, dodge and lean, and step backwards, forwards and side to side, which the developers used for extra interactions. It still worked on phone based Daydream View headsets with three degrees of freedom. The large city views relied on Seurat, a Google technology that let mobile hardware show detailed environments by baking complex scenes down into much lighter geometry. Because the touchpad could turn the view, the whole game could also be played seated.

Behind The Scenes

Development

Seismic Games was a studio with a history on major series such as Skylanders and Call Of Duty. In late 2016 it acquired the mixed reality developer Grue Games, and in September 2017 it teased a possible link to Blade Runner. Alcon Media Group, the company behind Blade Runner 2049, partnered with Google and Lenovo to bring the game to Daydream. The story was written to sit after the 1982 film and lead toward the 2049 setting, with the last Nexus 6 replicants dying off and the underground going on the offense against the city.

The Daydream Platform

Google showed the game at CES in January 2018 as one of the first titles optimized for WorldSense and the Lenovo Mirage Solo, which it presented as the first standalone Daydream headset. Clay Bavor, Google's vice president of virtual and augmented reality, called it the first example of Google working with developers on six degrees of freedom games for mobile VR. Press coverage described the game as a showcase for the Mirage Solo, and Alcon bundled it with the headset while stocks lasted. It also became one of the first public games to use Google's Seurat rendering tools, which later appeared in Vader Immortal.

The Audio Team

The sound was made by Hexany Audio, a Los Angeles studio brought on by Seismic. Audio director and studio owner Richard Ludlow led the work with technical sound designer Nick Tomassetti and composer and sound designer Jason Walsh. The team worked with the developers through source control as part of a distributed setup, and being a short drive from the Seismic offices let both sides visit for mixes. Walsh said they leaned toward the sounds of the 1982 film because of where the game sat on the Blade Runner timeline, which led to an analog style rather than a clean digital one.

Mix reviews took place in the Hexany VR room. One person played in the Daydream headset while the game was cast to a television, and Wwise was connected wirelessly to the build running on the device so the team could change the mix in real time. A cable from a Pixel phone ran through a headphone splitter, which let four or five people hear the game at once while they watched together. Ludlow said this made group mixing sessions simple, and the same project later formed the basis of conference talks on mobile VR sound in Japan and San Francisco.

Wwise And Spatial Sound

The point to point movement shaped the mix. Tomassetti explained that because the player always stood at a fixed spot and height, the only real variable was where they looked, so many scenes had their own mix built with Wwise parameters, states and events unique to each point. In the rainy Chinatown alley, the level of the rain and the focus of the mix shifted as Harper moved. From the center of the alley, he could hear the Hare Krishna chant, the cooking chef and the club music, and choosing one of them pulled the mix toward it while quieter ambient sounds filled in.

Ludlow said the team used no ambisonic recordings. Because Daydream was a mobile platform with tight technical limits, they built the world from mono, stereo and quad files placed as emitters, and they relied on Wwise positioning to create spatial ambiences without attaching every element to an object in the Unity scene. For the head related positioning of key sounds they used Google Resonance, which he described as very efficient but more limited in features and sound quality than other plugins. The team used it selectively for sounds that needed precise placement and layered other spatial methods around it.

Release

Alcon announced the release on 4 May 2018, the same day the Lenovo Mirage Solo went on sale. The game was available from the Google Play store for $8.99 and ran on both the Mirage Solo and Daydream View headsets. The announcement described it as an adventure thriller in a multi branching story about being human in a world where technology and biology had become indistinguishable. Google stopped selling its Daydream headsets in 2019, and the game was eventually removed from Google Play, which left it unavailable to buy and hard to play on current hardware.

Reception

UploadVR later named the game one of the great Daydream exclusives that few people would ever play. It praised the focus on investigation and the tension in the interviews, and it called the game one of the best looking VR titles on mobile hardware. Players who bought it at launch singled out the Seurat city views from the spinner, the detailed character models and the sound. Common complaints were heavy aliasing in the large interiors, teleport movement and a fairly linear path through the case. Many still counted it among the best experiences on Daydream and noted that it fit well beside the two films.

Conclusion

Blade Runner: Revelations was a short but dense chapter of the series that placed a new blade runner in the years after the Blackout. Harper's case moved from Chinatown to the Tyrell pyramid and ended with a decision about Night Owl, a virus that could have wiped out every replicant. Its two endings showed both sides of the war, with Harper either serving the unit or joining the underground to protect a very special child. Like Westwood's Blade Runner game, it left the question of whether its hero was human open, and its delisting from Google Play made it one of the rarest Blade Runner stories.

External Sources

• Blade Runner: Revelations launch announcement from Alcon Entertainment
• Hexany Audio on the sound of Blade Runner: Revelations at Audiokinetic
• Road to VR on the CES 2018 reveal
• UploadVR on the best Daydream exclusives

---

Tag Categories: Blade Runner Lore | Blade Runner Games