I remember buying Westwood Studios (miss those guys) point-and-click Blade Runner game to play on my old ThinkPad, back in the late 1990s. It was the first game I can recall owning that spanned multiple disks. While I was surprised to find that the main character in the game neither looked or sounded like Harrison Ford—I didn't know much about how licensing and actor's contracts worked at the time—I was completely hooked from the first time that I turned it on. I finished the game multiple times over the years until, sadly, a friend that I lent the game to moved out of province without returning it to me. By then, I'd moved on to other games and had tired of changing discs just to travel from one area to another. However, every once in a while, I sigh, wistfully, wishing I could give it another go. Today, I found out that this is a very doable thing:

From The Verge:

Blade Runner is beloved to this day, but until very recently, the odds of a digital rerelease seemed almost nonexistent. Westwood lost the original source code in 2003 during a move. So players needed to find one of the game’s increasingly rare hard copies or an unofficially cracked version of it, then go through the considerable trouble of getting it to work on a modern PC.

That started to change this summer when a team started publicly testing ScummVM emulator support. The game became playable through ScummVM in October, but the content still couldn’t be officially found online.

In A Heart Between Parts, your first act as a player is to unsnip the thread that sews your lips shut. Some scientist tried to make himself a wife and was unhappy with how you turned out, so you've been locked away.

This brief but piquant point-and-click adventure game by Stefan "leafthief" Srb has the beautiful pixel art that is the creator's trademark, and it's full of beautiful little beats about choosing life, even when you don't know when or why you are. It's another "You are the Monster" 48-hour game from the recent Ludum Dare 33 game jam, which helps explain why it's so little, but its smallness helps it feel delicate and restrained, never too maudlin. The game's puzzles are easy to solve; it's more about the journey of thought and hope you take along the way.

Download A Heart Between Parts for free or donation here. Read the rest