Runaway: A Road Adventure

20 years ago I'd given it a 4 out 5, but given how well the game still holds up today, it's a 5 out 5. It is fun and reminds me of Broken Sword, but with cell-shaded 3D character models and a screen resolution that still holds up today. The story is a bit less serious and the pacing is pretty on point until the end. Another big plus is the voice-acting, it really helps with the immersion. Gameplay mechanics and the UI interactions are straight forward, you either look at something, pick it up or move towards it. Inventory access for combining and using items is also straight forward; no unnecessary clicks or alike. And for screen transitions, you can mostly doubleclick waypoints to skip walking animations; although there are a few 'missed opportunities'. There also isn't too much pixel-hunting with a few exceptions. Combining items and the puzzle-solving is also usually not too far-fetched, although at some point you probably do need a guide for a few tricks as there is no hint system. Fun-wise, after the strong intro, the first hospital level is kinda boring, but it gets better afterwards. New locations are not as extensive as the might look at the first sight. That's a good thing imho. Nor is there much repetition or dragging out the puzzles. That is kind of its charm, the chapters move on decently quickly and the story-telling in between is pretty engaging, it keeps you wanting to move the plot forwards. Concerning the downsides; technically: on Windows 11 the startup developer-logo screen flickers, but afterwards the game runs flawlessly, supports ALT+TAB and zero crashes. On exit, it does keep the screen in the lower resolution, but that's not uncommon for older games on newer Windows. Gameplay-wise, the very last chapter seems to have a few shortcuts near the very end of the story, like they ran out of time. But it is very minor. Luckily they didn't skip on the end-demo.

I can absolutely recommend this game. Good story, good characters, nice drawings, solvable puzzles. The only minor flaw is that some objects you need to find are merely visible and some serious "pixel hunting" is required. But that does not spoil the game.

At win11 the graphics is very bad. You can download the voodoo2 wrapper from [https]://dege.fw.hu/dgVoodoo2/dgVoodoo2/ to solve this. Use the four dll files from archive path ms\x86\ and run the "Video Card Setup.exe" from Runaway to choose the Voodo2 adapter

some items difficult to pinpoint

Played it a long time ago, what i remember: - Pixel perfect and strange logical point and click, be warned. -Excellent story, characters, graphism and rythm. My advice: play it with a walkthrought near you and if you don't find, don't get too much frustrated, look for the answer, yell "WHHAAAAT!!! how was i supposed to find that???", execute the strange solution or struggle to find the requiered pixel, then enjoy the following part of the story. Rince and repeat till the end, enjoy without loosing your mind ;)