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.
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.