Runaway: A Road Adventure

I enjoyed the Runaway series more than the Broken Sword series. There, I said it! Because let's face it, if you are going to compare Runaway with another game, that would be Broken sword. And while the Broken Sword series started with a bang, they felt to be going lower with each release, while Runaway kept the bar on pretty much the same level throughout the trilogy. Mind you that, although a trilogy, they are three complete games, meaning there are no cliffhanger endings here, just three adventures with the same protagonists in the same universe. If I had to name the weaker of the three I would say the second (Dream of the turtle). It's plot does tend to be a bit all over the place, but the title alone should prepare you for that. But man, what a cinematic adventure feeling each title has! Gangsters, conspirators, money hunts, flamboyant characters, travels, exploration, twists, all wackiness is there for our entertainment! The graphics speak for themselves through the images and trailers, and the voice overs and music are well above average. In conclusion, play the first (wait for a discount if need be), and if you like what you get, proceed to the rest without fear!

Runaway has a list of problems that make it very hard to enjoy the game: - Some of the puzzles depend on player finding an item, but there is no option to highlight available items nor do they stick out from the background. - Some of the interactions are different after first or second time (and sometimes only after some criteria are met) - The story is told by the main character as a narrator. He's not funny or entertaining, so these unskippable segments are pretty boring. - Order matters when combining items. All of this makes the gameplay pretty boring as it often consists of me desperately trying to figure out whether I've skipped an item combination, didn't interact for the second time with something or missed an item (and let me tell you these can be tiny). All that work makes it hard for me to enjoy the story.

Presentation-wise, Runaway is gorgeous. But everything else is terribly average. The plot is a confused effort that swings between a campy murder mystery to an "Indiana Jones" style mystic adventure. Add a few odd turns towards science fiction and you get a story that has trouble deciding where it is headed. Some fun can be had from the colorful characters along the way, but their silliness is at odds with the serious atmosphere the game tries to convey. It's a game that simply has trouble deciding what kind of story is it telling. Is it a serious crime drama? A light-hearted mystery? An odd-couple journey story? And all of these are simply at odds with each other. The puzzles start smart but quickly become contrived and forced. Runaway is by no means bad, but it is very average.

I got a feeling that the game developers wanted to punish their players. Even though story-wise it was acceptable, just very campy, silly, and ridiculous, the gameplay and puzzles were awful. Half of the objects to pick are deliberately made tiny and barely visible, not standing out in any way. There is no way to highlight active spots, so you must constantly hunt for pixels. And multiple objects are often located side by side, so you may find one, but miss the other due to the way the cursor works. There is often no logic to the puzzles and sometimes no clear goals given, so you must try every possible option and combination. To make matters worse, even if you have interacted successfully with one spot or item, it doesn't mean it is out of the game. You may need to interact with it a second or even a third time later, but with a different outcome. Yet, there is no indication that you must do it, so unless you follow a guide or try to methodically brute force all possible action combinations, you will get frustrated with the game really fast. And the story is not worth the suffering. To make it worse, the order of interaction matters and you have to look at one spot first to enable interaction option somewhere else. And going back and forth gets really annoying. If you still want to play it, use a guide from the start. That way you will get some fun out of it. To run the game, first go into the game folder and run videocardsetup.exe, then set the main game executable to run as admin in compatibility settings, then start the game, press escape key to open the game settings, then switch graphics to low, then press "y" key on the keyboard.

Overall the story is passable but the game play suffers a lot of problems. 1. Pixel hunting. There is no clear indicator when you missed something. 2. Rechecking item/Backtracking Some items you cannot be gotten until you trigger an event so you may end up rechecking items and areas multiple time 3. Puzzle aren't always logical. There are puzzle that are meant to be funny which makes it hard to figure out how to solve it. There were some solution that I would never have thought in a million years 4. Needle in a haystack. There are similar item laying on the floor or other area but you cannot not pick them up. You can only pickup items that the game allows. 5. There are quite a few racial stereotypes that some may find it offensive.