Runaway: A Road Adventure

The Good
New Spanish company Pendulo Studios developed an adventure game called Runaway: A Road Adventure, in an attempt to resurrect the adventure genre. In this mystery, you play Brian Basco who is glad that his application for a position at Berkeley University is accepted. He immediately drives down to California, but ends up hitting a gorgeous nightclub dancer. Brian takes her to hospital where he discovers that her name is Gina, who is targeted by gangsters after she watched her father get murdered. Brian also finds out by helping her, his life is also in danger.

Runaway is a point-and-click adventure along the lines of the Broken Sword games. Since I have not yet played any of the BS games, I can't tell you how the two compare. Although you need to control the game with the mouse, there is no command line, no icons, just a single mouse cursor which morphs into an icon if you can interact with it. So you don't have to click multiple times, you only need to click once. I like how the cursor morphs into icons. I did not see a similar thing in other adventure games, and it is quite new to me.

There are six chapters in the game, and each chapter has an objective. For example, in chapter one, you have to find some way of waking Gina and getting out of the hospital before the thugs come by. In chapter two, you need to find the mystery of the crucifix, and in chapter three, you and Gina are held hostage and the both of you must escape. Each chapter has more exciting objectives to complete.

The graphics are excellent. They contain a mixture of 2D and 3D, although I did not notice the 3D in the game, maybe except for the cut-scenes. The graphics fill up the whole screen, meaning that nearly half of the screen isn't cut off by icons or commands. Each background is hand-drawn nicely. The environments look stunning, and these include the museum, the Arizona Desert, and the ghost town of Douglasville. These are the only three locations within the game, and out of these three, I enjoyed walking around Douglasville. There is so much to do in this town, and so many people to interact with. As for the resolution that the game uses, Runaway uses the highest resolution (1024x768). At the time, this was the highest that adventure games would run in.

The game's musical soundtrack includes over 24 songs, but I was too busy playing the game to hear them all. Some of the music that I actually stopped and listened to are great. The sound effects are what you expect from old cartoon shows and cartoon-like adventure games.

Nearly all the characters you meet help you on your quest. Some of them are quite funny to listen to, especially Oscar and Rudger. Along with the graphics, all characters are well drawn. I like how hot Gina looks: sexy and the way that exotic dancers and striptease artists look like. If she was a real person, I would make sweet love to her on a beach. But of course, I have to establish some sort of relationship first.

There are three CDs that the game uses, and you are asked to insert all CDs both while installing the game and while playing it. Two chapters are installed on each CD: one and two on CD #1, three and four on CD #2, and the rest on CD #3. This means that Runaway asks you to insert a CD every second chapter.

The Bad
When I brought this game, I knew that the game was from a Spanish developer, so I had the strange feeling that the character's voices would be in Spanish. But in the end, it turned out that they were in English. To tell you the truth, the voices were originally done in Spanish, but later got translated into English. As a result, the game suffers from poor lip-syncing in some parts of the game.

As mentioned earlier, you do have to insert each CD throughout the game, to load every second chapter. This wastes a lot of time, which I found annoying. You are asked to insert CDs during install, which I also said, so there is no need for this. Before starting the game, you have to insert CD #1 due to the fact that the bloody StarForce program kicks in.

The Bottom Line
Runaway is filled with mystery and suspense, as you, the player, must protect a nightclub dancer from a group of gangsters who are bent on killing her. During your travels, you interact with heaps of characters who go out of their way to help you on your mission. The graphics, sound, and storyline is great, going along the lines of the Broken Sword games. There are six chapters in the game, and in each one of them, you need to complete a series of goals that include escaping from a location and getting to a specific area the hard way. Apart from the shocking lip-syncing from the characters when Runaway was translated, a major problem that I had was inserting CDs during the game. There is a DVD version of the game, so that would have been fixed in that release, but I can't tell because, as of this writing, I don't own a DVD drive.