Runaway: A Road Adventure

I was searching for some funny, even if average, adventure game to lift up my spirits. Reading description of the series and seeing the ratings I decided to give this a try. It made my depression worse. Programming-wise, it seems okay even though there are some technical peculiarities like the absence of volume settings (so you cannot turn music volume down/up, only on/off). I actually quite like the graphic style. The music is not bad but doesn't feel connected to the style of the rest and is openly derivative. I did not detect any humour, probably a cultural thing. Voice acting is uninspired but not outright annoying like in e.g. Broken Sword, which is a classic despite that. Story is just uninteresting. Puzzles are easy save for the damned pixel hunting combined with horrible cursor behavior, puzzles are more about pixel hunting than thinking about what you should use and where. The dialogues, sorry, monologues, look like a bad translation from Spanish combined with cliche lines from old movies and some street lingo the writer decided to put in just to impress us with his English. In dialogues, you don't really have a choice in what the character says, you just click on every option until there are no more left. The screenplay is just bad, the character motivations may be logical but how they are explained is not. I felt like I was being force-fed endless cutscenes that the authors created to eliminate at least some of the non-sequitur that resulted from often arbitrary change of scenes. If someone asks me a week from now if I played it, I will not remember. I am absolutely sure of that. It's not even bad enough to be memorable and I bought for the price of two beers (beer is cheap here). I already forgot the title. Whatever.

This game is absolutely nothing one haven't seen before, and I think it's been done better in just about all of them, including quite a few games back in the 90s. Most of the opening is basically an incredibly bland character that's just talking and talking and talking. Bad way of starting a game; people will want to play a game, or at least see some properly mood-setting scenes. To add insult to injury, the guy's starting off by saying "I'll just cut to the chase" before doing the exact opposite of that. After that bit, we finally get an actual cut-scene that turns out to be the start of a kind of story that isn't even trying to be the least bit original. The funniest moment would be the fact that the oh-so-overused Damsel in Distress - after having being told to trust absolutely no-one - conveniently spills everything to a complete stranger that just ran over her with a car. And then, finally, the gameplay. The game is of course about "use things" and "use things on other things". Is it really too much to ask for some actual puzzles thrown in for the sake of variety? Oh, and also there's pixel-hunting; a gameplay staple I honestly thought we'd seen the last of once the 21st century got into gear. I guess that since they were throwing in all the other clichés, they'd be cruel to leave that one out.

I could swear that graphics doesn't look a day older than more than 20 years ago, when I played this for the first time. The game has its flaws like somewhat naive history with main character helping damsel in distress just because and there are some items in the game that are really hard to spot (if I've played the game several times over the years and I know that some item has to be somewhere here, but still need to look very closely to find it, this isn't good). Some puzzles are also illogical: you definitely CAN'T make blanks from just lipsticks and old gunpowder. For all it's faults, this game still is my guilty pleasure. It's something satisfying with this simple "live the dangerous adventure, outsmart bad guys and get rich and get the girl in the process" story.

I played this game long years ago and it´s still amazing. Love to see Brian going through this adventure

my favorite point and click adventure game! pretty short but with beautifull characters that are likeable and relateable..try it! it is a not such a long game ,but it sure is sweet.