Runaway: A Road Adventure

Let me preface my impressions with the following: This game suffers from a very noticeable unevenness in quality and production values. This is a very real flaw that might be offputting to some. Depending on your ability to stomach this issue this game is either a yummy snack or a rusty can of dogfood. This is nothing that can be described by a score or review, this is really something that depends on your gaming personality. At times the voice actors and 2D/3D graphics are doing their jobs admirably, everything meshes together really nicely. It's impressive how this game can look at times. At other times you'll stumble over obvious errors in the spoken dialogue/subtitles, shoddy voiceacting and cringeworthy character art, mixed with very unnatural animation. Maybe the devs run out of money? I don't know. One thing's for sure though: one gets the feeling that this was localized from a foreign language on a shoestring budget, leading to some lost depth and introducing some flaws in the process. If you can see past that issue you'll be treated to a charming game that point & click adventure fans will undoubtedly enjoy. It's probably more to the beginner side of things, since there are only two possible actions besides movement, namely looking at and manipulating things. Plus, your inventory always stays manageable and gets cleared out from time to time. You can probably play through this in one sitting on a weekend if you're a battlehardened pro, but IMHO that doesn't detract from its value. Any longer and the story would have started to fall apart. The way it is, it's a nice. bite-sized adventure, perfectly fine for a relaxing bout of point&click goodness. After all is said and done I'm pretty happy with both presentatioon and gameplay though. The puzzles are sufficiently obscure, yet somewhat logical, the story is pretty involving, the graphics are OK at worst, and the length of the whole game is just right. It sets out to tell a little roadmovie-like story, and it succeeds well at that. Don't expect anything overly fancy, this is not a genre-redefining blockbuster with a huge budget. This is a slightly flawed, rather simplicistic game with a certain charm that'll keep you coming back if you accept it for what it is. Again, I certainly don't regret spending my money on this, but YMMV - be aware that this game is far from perfect. This really needs to be stressed. This game is rock stable and gameplay-wise quite competent (if simplicistic in comparison to the heavy hitters), but it suffers from an uneven presentation more than anything else. It's slightly above average due to that inconsistent gameplay experience IMHO.

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.

Runaway is a point and click adventure with a classic mood. So there are few surprises: the control system is the classic well known one, very simple to use, that has made the fortune of this genre of game. The player has to collect objects and use them to solve some puzzles. In this way our hero will reach the end of the story. The classic mood is also present in the plot of the game. As the Broken Sword series, two are the protagonist of the game a young man and a young woman that will be involved in a long adventure (but not too long) made of intrigues and surprises. Nothing is as it seem and the player will be involved in an adventure “on the road” in many American settlements. Plot is built also above the contrast between the timid young and (cultured) man, a graduated, and the unscrupulous and mysterious young woman, from this point of view the plot is different from the one of Broken Sword series. From a technical point of view graphic is excellent. Programmers decided to give more challenge with puzzles. The same objects will be useful to solve a puzzle in a scenario in which in a precedent situation it seemed useless. So my advice is to try every solution in order to solve a puzzle, anyhow puzzles are not too difficult and with good reasoning every hard passage can be solved. In my opinion a solid game with a solid plot, not a masterpiece, but an adventure that will involve the player until the end.

I will give the makers of Runaway a certain level of props for trying. They didn't go the clickable slideshow route of the umpteen thousand Myst-clones that pass for the majority of the modern adventure game market. (These are not universally awful, of course, but they tend to lack a certain something.) And it's certainly a good looking game, with smooth, cartoony visuals that bring back memories of the good old days...except with modern rendering power. Unfortunately, they flub the single most important aspect of the genre, to my tastes - the writing. If the writing isn't good - oneliners, plot, dialogue, whatever else - I really feel you may as well not bother. It's not that I dislike puzzles, but there are many pure puzzlers out there that tend to scratch that particular itch better than the adventure genre. It's the bundling of puzzling and engaging storytelling that make adventure games magic to me. And Runaway has incredibly terrible writing, across the board. The "humor" is forced and moronic. The plot is a mishmash of cliches and boredom. The characters are extremely grating and obnoxious. And if I recall correctly, it's translated from French and poorly. (Maybe it's better in French, but I doubt it.) So right there, Runaway drops off the "worth playing" list to my mind. It then compounds that sin by having dumb and unintuitive "puzzling" barely worthy of the name. Trust me. Go buy the Broken Sword games instead. -They- offer the sort of adventure gaming experience that made the genre great.