Silicon Dreams
Linux Format|August 2021
Management loves to treat the staff like robots. A defiant Luke Kemp can confirm that they’re certainly not human…
Luke Kemp
Silicon Dreams
SPECS

Minimum OS: Ubuntu 12.04+

CPU: 2GHz

Memory: 4GB

HDD: 4GB

GPU: Shader Model 4 capable

Although 1982’s Blade Runner has inspired three trillion and six films, games, books, comics, albums and cereals, only a tiny percentage of them have understood (or even tried to understand) the film. Hurling neon signs and Japanese words around does not constitute telling a cyberpunk story. Here, however, we have a game that not only understands Blade Runner, but thoroughly deserves to be mentioned alongside it. Y’know, like we just did.

The Voight-Kampff test is how blade runners determine whether an individual is human, or a human-seeming android. Silicon Dreams takes the idea of this test, and especially the machine involved in conducting it, and runs with it. It runs hard, it runs fast, and it runs with a hell of a lot of style.

Your character is an android created with the sole purpose of running what is for legal reasons absolutely not a Voight-Kampff machine. Silicon Dreams (mostly) consists of a half dozen or so interrogations conducted with this machine. Usually you’ll be speaking with androids, but occasionally with a human. While at some point you’ll have to determine whether somebody is human or android, the experience for the most part takes sharp turns into territory you’ll never see coming.

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