It’s always the surprises that hurt the most. In news both shocking and devastating, a supposedly unannounced single-player Blade Runner title in development by Supermassive Games and slated for a 2027 release has been silently canceled.
This comes as an exclusive scoop from Insider Gaming. The British game studio best known for horror games Until Dawn, The Dark Pictures Anthology and The Quarry, reportedly began pre-production of Blade Runner: Time To Live in September 2024, with a core team comprising those who worked on The Quarry.
Pre-production was scheduled to end in March 2025, with prototyping to end by September 2025. Anticipating a release in 2027, the game was set to be released on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC, with a version reportedly in development for the next generation of PlayStation and Xbox systems.
Renowned for cinematic narrative experiences, with 2015’s Until Dawn set for a big screen adaptation this year, Supermassive Games was a superb fit for the Ridley Scott’s iconic adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s 1968 novel “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?,” an adaptation that itself has become archetypal of both dystopian and cyberpunk aesthetics.
Blade Runner: Time To Live was set to be a third-person action adventure casting players as So-Lange, a vintage Nexus-6 model android, living well beyond its expected, limited lifespan. According to sources and documents provided to Insider Gaming, Time To Live would have been set in the “teeming undercity of New Zurich 2065” with the player “betrayed and left for dead in a brutally hostile environment.”
Gameplay would have consisted of “gameplay pillars,” including stealth, combat, exploration and investigation, and “dramatic character interaction,” with Supermassive Games planning to include what it called “punchy and authentic dialogue.” The game was also planned to include “gameplay themes” such as upgrading skills and abilities, using memories to expand the story and exploring in-game technology to complete your investigations across the city.
Time To Live was reportedly still quite early in its development at the time of cancellation and so these features were likely to change as development progressed, but nevertheless offer a glimpse of a tantalising open world experience, with one source reportedly calling it “rather impressive.”
While the reason for the game’s cancellation is unclear, Insider Gaming’s sources indicate that the decision to cancel came at the end of last year, and was a direct result of Alcon Entertainment, Blade Runner’s rights owner.
Alcon’s own gaming subsidiary, Alcon Interactive Group, is currently working on its own Blade Runner title, Blade Runner 2033: Labyrinth alongside publisher Annapurna Interactive.
Following this report, Insider Gaming reached out to both Supermassive Gaming and Alcon Entertainment for comment on the game’s cancellation. Supermassive Games advised they were “unable to comment on this,” while Alcon Entertainment has yet to respond.Â
