Runaway: A Road Adventure

The protagonist is boring. The lady only exists to be the 'damsel in distress', several times over, and the 'reward' at the end. The puzzles are mostly logical, but suffer from often requiring you to find objects that are difficult to find because they blend into the background, or searching objects you've already searched before, which creates too much frustrating backtracking. With a bit of polish it could have been a classic, as it is... meh.

Lovely to look at with some solid puzzles (and a few not-so-solid puzzles). The music is nice enough and the voice acting is fine, but the script tries so desperately to be funny and it's just...not. Worth a play-through for the hard-core point-and-click adventurer, but sadly its flaws coupled with a lackluster story make it a pretty so-so experience.

...but it certainly points to a glaring amount of flaws that simply cannot be overlooked, such as the cutscenes. God, those look abominable. Absolutely amateurish, as are the shortcuts used via narration whenever the developers opted (or couldn't afford to) have any, where you get overacted narration that just screams "low budget!" at the top of its lungs. The English voice acting ranges from barely acceptable to awkward, and the puzzles start out nicely, with an internal logic that actually makes sense and you easily get the hang of, but towards the end occasionally veer into borderline unfairness that can only be solved via brute force. And too many of the characters you interact with just aren't interesting, and I couldn't bring myself to care hearing their life stories. Also, the injection of a sense of drama, when the player is supposed to believe a character died, fails spectacularly, as does the main character's "oh, well, I'll just carry on, then" attitude. Those are pretty egregious faults, and one simply cannot bring himself to overlook them, no matter how much one loves P&C adventures and is willing to acknowledge the developers' passion. And Runaway was clearly made by passionate people who love a genre that was dying when this game first came out. Even with its limitations, it has charm, some nice and unexpected touches in detail, and you can't help but be drawn into the nonsensical world of the adventure it displays. Runaway just didn't earn an average score from me, but it did earn enough goodwill with the effort and got me curious to see how the developers fared in the subsequent iterations, as it has all the makings of a good P&C game.

Nice & Thanks for discounts:)

GoG