Runaway 2: The Dream of the Turtle

somehow the title of the game is not really relevant to the plot itself!? aside from long cutscenes and could-have-been adventures (those cutscenes could have been a fully fleshed out game title by themselves), the game feels a bit short to me. anyhow the graphics is wonderful.

I bought this game about six years ago, it's a localized copy came with mistranslating and several crush at certain points, but these "extras" did not effect my review of the game. First thing first, I done a walked through of Road Adventure so I was well aware of the game mechanizm such as searchin' a spot 100 times, pixel hunting, and other inconsistencies, though those are not really changed, I'm not about to complain - but keep in mind. Our fresh millionaire couple in trouble again Gina is went missing on a tropical island, our primery goal to find and rescue her. Of course we have many difficulties, one of is our old crazy vacuum cleaner headed friend Joshua with his 4 number intelligence. Sometimes I felt very nervous because the way of certain solution workin'. One is this: you can keep a huge firewood, a chainsaw etc. in your pocket, but later you gonna receive two bottles of wine and in order to advance forward you have to put them down but you wont get even a slightest hint to do that. Summarization: + some cool setting as Junge, Tropical Island, Alaska, Pirate ship - ... except Shusi's ship + references to Monkey Island + Lokelani - lenghty and boring cutscenes at the end - ends on a cliffhanger

Pros: - Very, very beautiful graphics and animations. - Interesting story. - Funny dialogs (although there are too much of them). - Good characters. - Nice music. - Some fair and well-constructed puzzles. - One click skips dialogue line, double click gets you immediately to the next room. Cons: - There are too many crazy, unfair and absurd puzzles which have no hints at all and make you feel stupid. I got stuck too much. - It's easy to miss objects or even PLACES, which makes you feel even more stupid when you found them after trying everything on everything (which I did a looooot of times). - The first time you discover such places, the default action is "Look at" instead of "Go to". - Red herrings or useless hotspots make the everything on everything tests much longer. Also, they leave you with the feeling that some important things are not concluded (please, never ever let a key guarded by a big guy next to the door it opens if you don't plan the player to open that door, even if your character says he is scared to go there!). - More than once you have to use something with a place! I mean, with the arrow that points to the next room. I feel that breaks the implicit game rules. Some of these things are impossible to figure out. In Runaway 1 one of these puzzles forced me to look for a walkthrough. This time I choosed to use brute force even with those arrows. And it worked a couple of times! - You must redo some actions after something changed to get new reactions, which makes brute force even harder. - You have to speak with someone again to get new information after an action, which you don't try because you have already repeated the same dialog lines a lot of times when you are stuck looking for relevant info you missed. - Some imes you have to talk to someone and have to wait a long time for a cutscene. But even when there are so many unforgivable cons, the look and feel of the game is so nice that I will have a good (and masochistic) memory of it.

The graphics and animation are ok, but the game itself? Oh, dear lord... Look, I've been playing adventure games since the ZX Spectrum, but you haven't experienced pixel hunt until you've played this game: I was CONSTANTLY missing objects and possible pathways even when I was specifically trying to look out for them. Plain horrible. And while some of the puzzles are decent, plenty of them make (much less than) ZERO sense - *SPOILER ALERT* why the heck would anyone in their right mind try to substitute the head of a goddamn _moose_ for a bear suit head?!? Not only that, but since when is it acceptable to leave a puzzle hinging on a storage area that you can't look into yourself (so you'd know what exactly is in it), but you have to return later to , in order to find out that it DOES have the crucial missing element you need to progress?!? So yeah - if you really insist on completing this part of the Runaway saga, get a walkthrough and some booze (for patience++), otherwise DON'T BLOODY BOTHER.

Typically, game developers would learn from their successes and failures in their previous game(s), and make some changes to their next title. It seemed like Pendulo didn't, and pretty much did the same thing as they did with 'Runaway'. If you were frustrated by extreme linearity of the puzzle solving 'Runaway', you'll get more of it in this game. If you disliked Brian Basco's bland personality (and the accompanying bad voice acting), you'll hate him even more here. If you expect to see more of Gina, well...you won't. (Seriously.) While the road adventure story in 'Runaway' was a bit formulaic, the plot in 'Runaway 2' became ludicrous. It seemed like 'Runaway 2' tried to be more like 'Broken Sword' by offering a globe-trotting adventure. However, 'Runaway 2' failed to provide groundedness to make the story believable and enjoyable. For me, 'Runaway 2' was buggy. Any cutscene or playable scenes featuring snowfall would slow down the game dramatically to an unplayable state. I needed to install a third-party forced window mode patch in order to finish the game. All that was for naught as the ending was disappointing and unsatisfying because the story is incomplete! As a game trilogy, 'Runaway' can really do without 'Runaway 2' because you don't really need to play it in full to enjoy 'Runaway 3'. But that's for another review...