In preparation for playing the third game in the Runaway series, A Twist of Fate, (which I recently purchased from Good Old Games) I’m replaying the first two instalments of this point-and-click adventure game series. Runaway is a series created by a Spanish developer, Pendulo Studios, and it’s definitely a series created by adventure game fans for adventure game fans. So expect a lot of challenge and in-jokes.
The first game is actually one of my all-time favourite adventure games, despite some of its rather obvious flaws…
Gameplay: 4/5 – Runaway does a good job of keeping the interface simple with only one mouse action-key and a circle of action options available by clicking the right mouse-key. Brian walks quite slowly across the screen, but you can skip to another location by double clicking the arrow-icons which is nice. The only negative thing about the cursor-interface is that the size of active hot-spots can be extremely small for certain items, resulting in some easy misses on necessary inventory items and even a little bit of pixel-hunting.
Graphics: 4½/5 – The game has excellent art-direction with excellent hand-drawn backgrounds and pre-rendered, cell-shaded 3D character models. The game’s look meshes together nicely and I quite like the game’s quirky cartoon appearance and the characters’ bizarre anatomies. However, the game is littered with small graphical bugs which present themselves at odd times and this slightly detracts from the otherwise excellent graphic look.
Animation: 4/5 – For the most part really good and the pre-rendered cutscenes in particular look nice. The game can be a bit economic with them, often substituting cutscenes with Brian’s narration of the event. In game animations are also nice though there’s a lot a of very noticeable looping. However, if there’s anything I think this game really suffers from its the slightly static and lifeless facial animations.
Music: 5/5 – I think the music is excellent. I love the main theme song by Liquor which is played with varying and different instrumentations through the different parts of the game. However, all the music in the game is excellent and creates a nice ponder some atmosphere, while perfectly fitting every major location (from the city and deserts to the mob hideouts and Indian villages). The game owes a great deal of its atmosphere to the excellent soundtrack by David Garciá-Morales Inés.
Sound: 3/5 – I think the most mixed bag aspect of the whole game. For such a small voice-cast (six actors) all the character voices do sound distinct which is a good thing, but the problem comes in with the actual dialogue. I think this is a problem of the game being originally in Spanish and having a quite wordy English translation. For some characters, especially Brian, it’s appropriate but for a lot of the supporting cast, it feels a little unnecessarily intricate, corny and… like I said, wordy. Also, while Marc Biagi does a good job selling Brian’s geekiness, his acting goes a little over the top and you’ll definitely get sick of him saying “Hey yeah!” every time you solve a puzzle. Lani Minella does a good job as all the female voices, though Sushi and Gina sound a little over-dramatic (again, mainly because of the wordy dialogue). The best performances by far are from Jon “Duke Nukem” St. John, whose amazing masculinity lends itself well to the roles of a mob-boss, a helicopter-flying hunk and most awesomely, the Indian chief Wuputchim.
Plot: 4/5 – I think hands down this game’s greatest forte. The game keeps the player in the dark enough in order to make it exciting and interesting, but also paces itself really well with clever plot-movements. It also doesn’t run out of steam even during the last two acts, but instead manages to pull a few unexpected twists. The only part where I felt the story dragged its feet a little bit is when you end up doing seemingly meaningless chores for Joshua.
Difficulty: Hard, but mostly fair – If you’re a pro, Runaway provides some nice and cleverly designed puzzles which require not only smarts and logical thinking, but also a bit of creativity. Nowhere does the game ever break the logic loop and the one good thing about the extremely wordy dialogue is that the game prefaces its puzzles quite thoroughly. The biggest problem with puzzle solving tends to be that interactive objects sometimes blend perfectly into the background and you have to remember to inspect certain locations (and bags) several times.
Score: 82% – Runaway: A Road Adventure isn’t a flawless game by any means, in fact it left quite a lot of improvement for the sequel – but for an adventure game made by a small independent company, it’s really good. The love and care to detail as well as Pendulo’s obvious appreciation of the genre shine through the game and I always enjoy playing it.
