Runaway suffers from numerous flaws that don't make it worth your time. First and foremost the puzzles are intensely frustrating. Often it comes down to clicking on a single pixel or two within an area to find what you're looking for. For instance, differentiating a gray piece of paper on an equally gray file cabinet. Runaway can't be blamed for this entirely, as it is a common trope in a lot of adventure games. It cannot escape however, that often you'll know exactly what to do with the items you have, but are unable to, unless you go through the contrivances of a specific conversation or do so in a specific place, in a order of clicking. This often means retracing your steps across levels again and again. In one situation for instance (spoiler ahead) you have to fill up a train's boiler with an oil can, a task that requires you to walk across town five times, repeating the same actions. That's lazy game design. Another problem is that you often have to go back and repeatedly click certain things that earlier were useless to you. There is never any indication given as to when or how to do this, so you're left with exhaustively trying every item in every area hoping that finally, the game has given you permission to proceed. So while the puzzles are often logical, they're bound up in so many contrivances that you'll find yourself straying from the right path due to the incompetence of their presentation.
The visuals range from striking to exceeding clunky. For instance, the backgrounds and scenes are fantastic, with brilliant art design, and a very unique look. This is helped along by a nice ambient music score. The characters themselves are also well designed until you see them up close that is. It is especially noticeable when characters speak, they're robotic mouth movements, low polygon faces, and stiff movements are laughable. That's not a sign of the game's age either, as there are numerous excellent titles previous to Runaway that surpass it in looks.
The plot has some promise to it, but it isn't helped by the fact that the main characters are both intensely unlikeable. The protagonist you play, Brian Basco, is a whiny twerp with no emotional value at all, who is joined by a vapid sidekick that likewise is unable to express anything close to human feeling. The game was translated from Spanish, but that's no excuse for not putting in some good voice acting or scripting work. This is made extra aggravating by the fact that so much of the game is taken up by long, sometimes ten or twenty minute cut-scenes. So much so that I start to wonder if the game designers wanted to simply make a digital cartoon, and were slightly peeved that they had to go the game route. Maybe the puzzles were just their way of inflicting their frustration on the gamer. In any case, avoid Runaway, there are far better adventure titles out there.