Policenauts takes a lot of the familiar contours of 80s/early 90s buddy cop action dramas and marries it with a somewhat cyberpunk space future setting that gives it an entirely unique character of its own. There's a lot of charm and humor to its story, and the details of its setting are expanded on and luxuriated in by Kojima who obviously put a lot of thought into what this sort of future could look like.

The point-and-click interface is the tool by which you investigate and converse, with other gameplay applications coming into use as the story progresses. Though it's mainly a visual novel of sorts, it alternates to shootout sequences (other console versions used Light Gun peripherals for these, which would have been awesome to experience) which have you try to kill the bad guy before your own health runs out.

A drawback of this game, which to some degree is an artifact of its time and place in the japanese computer game market of the early 90s, is the groping and molestation of the female characters which the game allows, but does not encourage, the player to do. There boob jiggle animations have their own credits, even.

It's an extremely unique and engaging game, with awesome animated sequences and inventive gameplay. I highly recommend emulating it with a translation if you can, and use a CRT shader as well to get the best visual experience. I'll be thinking about and referencing this game for a long time to come.

Science fiction adventure, Snatcher with more of a Lethal Weapon feel. Good story, characters, set up, world building, soundtrack, cutscenes, and voice acting. Terrible combat and a poor combat heavy end, after a slow start and build up of characters and the world everything starts moving too fast, a large number of bad clichés, main characters ignoring bullet wounds, and there are too many stupid things that happen (even though there is a good reason behind the antagonist's plans that ties in with how the game has been building the setting and even random conversations). Often out of place flirting, terrible women's outfits, and sexual assaults, don't know to blame the PC-98 (that this was originally released for) or Kojima. Wordy and detailed descriptions of everything (from looking at some woman's boobs leading to a conversation about their space outfit, to individual information of every type of food on the dinner table, to a description of how a futuristic couch works) can kill pacing and ends up creating plot holes. Playstation version art is more detailed but blurry up close and changes to art makes it look more like a generic anime than the more interesting art you get in something like Snatcher or other PC-98 titles. They did a good job with the fan translation.

This is a very personal game of mine that stuck with me through a very weird time in my life. It's not the best written game out there especially compared to other graphic adventures/VNs or Kojima's other works.

But it has so much charm and to it and the presentation is something very special and you won't really get to see anything quite like it. I recommend it if you are at all into old graphic adventures or if you love that oh so sweet 90's anime aesthetic.

I do have to warn you that it is VERY slow and some investigations scenes will really drag on while nothing is really happening

Played it for an hour, and in that hour didn't really notice anything worth continuing for.

In terms of gameplay, it's a run-of-the-mill first-person point-&-click affair with occasional horrendous mini-games. I much prefer third-person point-&-click games where you can control where your character goes. This one feels almost like a visual novel, as it just drops you into a room (basically an animated image) and forces you to click everything in sight until you find that one thing that advances the story. Dialogues work in a similar fashion, you have to blindly try out every single dialogue option, hoping you would accidentally hit the one that will be relevant for the story.

Regarding the story, I found it pretty mediocre. I have no doubts it does get more interesting later on, but the beginning was very boring. It's your typical noir-ish cyberpunk-ish set-up with a woman coming to the protagonist who runs a private detective agency and bringing him more trouble than he ever needed. I wish there was one fucking game (or movie/TV show/comic book) where the protagonist refuses to take the case and continues his boring life.

I feel like this game would've worked better as a OVA or whatever you call anime films/TV shows. It seems like something I might enjoy watching while having a dinner, but as a game it's just not fun. And the story doesn't push me to overcome the flaws of the gameplay. I think I might watch a walkthrough of it on YouTube some day, but I dunno.

A few years ago I got into collecting Sega CD repros, despite not actually owning a Sega CD. This wasn't a big deal, of course, since you can just pop the disc into any CD drive and play the game through emulation. This is how I enjoyed Snatcher for the first time, and shortly after I picked up a very authentic looking copy of Policenauts with an English patch applied.

Policenauts is may not be as good as Snatcher but still works well as a spiritual successor, borrowing just as heavily from movies Hideo Kojima likes as that game. Instead of being a love letter to cyberpunk classics like Blade Runner, Policenauts is a pretty straight-forward police procedural/buddy cop homage, with the two leads clearly being analogs for Riggs and Murtaugh from Lethal Weapon. In fact, if you want to be very reductive about it, Policenauts is essentially "Lethal Weapon in space."

The player controls Jonathan Ingram, sexual predator and founding member of the Policenauts, the first law enforcement entity in space. An accident during a space walk sends Jonathan adrift, though he's found many years later in stasis. Now estranged from his fellow officers, who have all grown older and found success higher up in the political food chain, Jonathan works as a hostage negotiator. However, he's soon called back into space where he reconnects with his former partner, Ed Brown, to unravel a conspiracy involving former members of the Policenauts and the mysterious Tokugawa corporation.

Like Snatcher, progress is earned by solving environmental puzzles, engaging in conversation with other characters, and (occasionally) whipping out a light gun and blasting some dudes. And, like Snatcher, the light gun segments are probably the weakest part of the game. They're very infrequent and they escalate in difficulty rather quickly, and since I played this via emulation I was stuck using a controller for all of them. One day I'll pop this into my Saturn and play it properly, but I suspect it will make playing these sections a lot more tolerable.

Puzzles are a lot more complex than they were in Snatcher, and a few of them can be pretty tense. One involves disarming a bomb under a tight time limit, and apparently this segment of the game does not play nice with emulators because the screen turns completely black during it. I could not fix this no matter how hard I tried and had to resort to using a youtube video as a guide and feel my way through it. Even without the added layer of anxiety, it's a pretty demanding puzzle, and I appreciate how much more Policenauts asks out of the player.

You also have to figure out where the bomb is even located before you can diffuse it, with one possible hiding place being a woman's chest. This does at least earn you a pretty funny game over, but... yeah. Policenauts is arguably Kojima's horniest game. In my Snatcher review I mentioned how Kojima's crass humor can sometimes cross a line, but at least Gillian wasn't capable of grabbing every female character he talks to.

It's also fun to spot all the things that show up later in Metal Gear Solid. Meryl is a prominent secondary character, Tokugawa Heavy Industry's logo is on the Cyborg Ninja's helmet, augments bleed white blood similar to Raiden in MGS4, hell Ed Brown was supposed to be a supporting cast member in Metal Gear Solid 2 before he was cut entirely. I always appreciated these little connective bits that loosely tie together Kojima's games, even if I don't think any of them can be considered part of one larger shared canon. It's just neat. I think it's fun.

Policenauts does lack some of Snatcher's personality and strangeness by rooting itself in a (comparatively) more grounded world, but that's not to say it's bereft of it. Every step of the way you can tell this is another project where Kojima was able to pour in a lot of references to media he loves while opining in his own unique way about real world theories on genetic engineering and space exploration. The sort of stuff you know is well researched, but still exists very firmly within the realm of fiction. There should be a term for that, really. Like... "Science fiction", or something. I don't know. Maybe not like that, sounds kinda dumb. I mean, it's alright too, you know, whatever.

Policenauts is not for everyone, and it is perhaps one of the harder games from Kojima's catalog to recommend to someone who is not already familiar with his work. It helps that this game is also pretty inaccessible. Emulation ain't great, and soft-modding a Sega Saturn and patching an ISO might be more work than it's worth for most people. However, if you find yourself drawn to Kojima's games then I do think you should try to check this one out. It's interesting to see how Kojima's storytelling grew (and regressed) from Snatcher, and as Metal Gear Solid's precursor, it makes for a good companion piece.

Before I considered Death Stranding to be my favorite game by Kojima outside of the Metal Gear series, Policenauts was initially my favorite.

With Snatcher being Kojima's version of Blade Runner, Policenauts would be Kojima's version of Lethal Weapon. But with a twist! Lethal Weapon is more fast-paced from start to finish but Policenauts takes its time to fully establish the world of Home and Beyond, the companionship of Ingram and Ed, and a murder case that is predictable. While the game is predictable due to the hints being obvious, the journey through Policenauts is a fun ride.

The controls are improved, being more of a "point-and-click" adventure compared to selecting a choice to advance into the next area. The same goes with the shooting mechanics, but it's more of a nightmare since it's free-aim and some shooting sections in the game are rage-inducing. (and why I recommend emulating the game on PC instead of playing on the PSP/PS Vita)

It's been 5 years since playing Policenauts for the first time, and revisiting the game made me appreciate the game as much as I thought. It was a bit nightmarish when I played it since I was 15 at the time, and I wasn't familiar with older Adventure games. But Policenauts was the game that made me appreciate Kojima as a game developer and encouraged me to branch out with games. 5 years later after doing so, revisiting Policenauts was a nostalgic ride seeing how I grew as a gamer. While my rating for the game may be generous, I'm surprised that my thoughts on the game haven't changed after playing Kojima's older works since some elements of them appear in the game.

With Metal Gear, Snatcher, Metal Gear 2, and Policenauts being games that made Kojima well-known, he would later produce a sequel to one of his games that would eventually shape the Stealth genre.

And thus... my final game on my Backlog and a game that I wanted to finish before disappearing.

Hideo Kojima ama le zizze, le tette pazze, le mammelle, ma ama anche rompere gli schemi, sperimentare, confondere: Policenauts è un cliccatutto-puzzle game-visual novel a tema poliziesco-cyberpunk, ma soprattutto, come ogni videogioco al mondo, è anche uno sparatutto platformer. Difficile a definirsi, caratteristica delle opere d'avanguardia: esiste un mondo prima di policenauts, in cui non esistono tette a zero g, e un mondo dopo policenauts, in cui i videogiochi sono capaci di parlare con il linguaggio del cinema, arricchendo la definizione di intrattenimento multimediale. Policenauts è un gioco grande e ricco e vario e profondo e fantasioso e divertente senza avere bisogno di essere un open world: il mondo che contiene è architettonicamente ricchissimo e perfetto e purtroppo non effettivamente sconfinato. Auspicabilmente di sconfinata troviamo la fantasia del giocatore, che non può smettere di pensare all'universo di Johnatan "Esposito" Ingram una volta spenta la propria console. Capolavoro/10, è un universo capace di esistere in autonomia, gravitante attorno alle mammelle pazze delle hostess a zero g del porco del signore dio puttana la mortadellazza eva

Policenauts è un capolavoro di dedizione e cura per i dettagli, un cult della fantascienza hard che non trascura di giustificare e rendere realistico ogni minimo elemento per restituire una esperienza incredibilmente immersiva e singolare. Il contesto investigativo è utilizzato quasi come una scusa per costruire una sorta di enciclopedia cyberpunk, che sfrutta ogni singolo oggetto osservabile per snocciolare nozioni di medicina, informatica, bioetica ed esplorazione spaziale. È un gioco estremamente generoso in termini di scrittura, estetica e varietà nel gameplay (si passa da fasi punta e clicca a sezioni di shooting, a puzzle per niente banali e a elementi di visual novel), e per questo non può che intrigare e appassionare chiunque abbia la pazienza di lasciarsi trasportare all'interno di una avventura inevitabilmente passiva e tendente alla verbosità, ma che sa senza dubbio come premiare la curiosità del videogiocatore. Ultima cosa da evidenziare, Policenauts è un gioco consigliatissimo ad una grande varietà di persone e sconsigliatissimo a poche, ma sicuramente è un must per chi voglia approfondire la figura di Kojima come autore; oltre a una serie di personaggi, musiche, nomi e dettagli che verranno poi ripresi nella saga di Metal Gear, in Policenauts si ritrova un po' tutto ciò che ha reso unico lo stile di Kojima, dall'approccio postmoderno che si appella continuamente al videogiocatore (talvolta anche ingannandolo e prendendolo in giro), all'ossessione per il linguaggio cinematografico che sa scoprirsi appieno nel momento in cui si immerge totalmente nelle caratteristiche del videoludico. Ottima merda.

Finally beat this after playing on and off like a series for an ungodly amount of time, but honestly in those spurts this proved to be hugely enjoyable and each piece was rightly entertaining.

Of course you don't interact with this one to a great degree, but it's cool to click around to get all the intricate little exposition dumps and Kojima details that you're probably here for.

The baddies are of course obviously bad and the plot is a big corporate conspiracy that of course Hideo would cook up, your protagonist is the likable womanizing pig that fits the tribute this plays to all noir.

The animated cutscenes are where this shines and the presentation overall, despite being a little slow on the loading most times, is pretty darn impressive. Still unique, still vibing vaporwave style over 20 years later.