This might seem an odd thing to write, but Bluepoint Games is currently one of my favourite developers. You can bemoan the circumstances that this Austin, Texas remaster specialist is profiting from - the holes that, two years in, continue to gape in Sony's internal game production schedule for PlayStation 4, with multiple major projects canned or writhing in development hell - but you cannot argue with the work.
With their crisp visual fidelity, flawless performance, fine detailing and careful attention to usability, Bluepoint remasters are as polished and easy to enjoy as any game software out there, up to and including the work of Nintendo's in-house teams. More than that, Bluepoint know how to do justice to their source material while letting it breathe - sometimes, arguably, better than the original creators managed. (Its Xbox 360 version of Titanfall must be the only port to older hardware to attract controversy for being too good.) Bluepoint's developers know exactly when to tweak or update, and when to leave well alone. They're keeping great games on the shelf on new systems, showing their best side and being themselves.
Gravity Rush Remastered, which Bluepoint produced alongside last year's superlative three-game Uncharted anthology, is a smaller-scale but still considerable challenge. Sony Japan Studio's weird and mostly wonderful steampunk fantasy was an early Vita game, so it has had to be made to work in a new, less intimate context. It has to be stood on its own two feet when it was originally locked in a tight embrace with its host hardware - Gravity Rush was something of a showcase for Sony's lofty and ultimately doomed ambitions towards expansive, visually rich portable gaming. And it's a strange, almost deliberately discombobulating game to start with. In other words, Gravity Rush is an awkward customer.
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