PC
In the tradition of Sam and Max Hit the Road and Monkey Island comes a point and click adventure featuring beautiful buxom babes, mafia goons, l33t hackers, drag queens in the desert, alien abductions and more!
Runaway – A Road Adventure tries to capture the magic of “point and click” adventure games like Lucasart’s Sam and Max Hit the Road and Monkey Island. It succeeds in providing an engaging story full of plot twists, amazing locations full of colour and energy and clever and funny characters. However, at times it seems more like an exercise in frustration than a computer game, with it’s incredibly linear storyline and hard to find objects.

The game starts with the main character Brian Basco telling the story of how bumped into Gina Timmins, a striking and quite buxom brunette; or rather how he accidentally ran her over in his car. Being the sensible physics geek he is, he takes her to hospital where she tells him a horrid story of the mafia, murder, and a strange crucifix. From here you find yourself on a wild ride of discovery across America as you try to outsmart the mafia and discover what the crucifix has to do with Gina, the Mafia, and Hopi Indians. Along the way you’ll meet a bunch of drag queens stuck in the desert *cough* Priscilla *cough*, archaeologists [I]sans[/I] whips and hat, freaky geeks obsessed with aliens, and pot smoking hippy hackers.

Using “cell shading”, the effect where 2D graphics are modelled in 3D, the game is given a real comic book feel. There’s also often a “box within a box” on screen, showing some kind of action and Brian’s reaction, also much like a comic book. The remarkable looking animated characters and gregarious backgrounds extend this comic book feel, with the dialogue often witty and cheesy, but also sometimes clever and wise. The story is told through the gameplay, as well as through animated cutscenes, and some of these cut scenes are very long, making this seem more like an interactive movie than a computer game, yet they’re engaging to watch.

Whilst the backgrounds are full of colour and detail, and this eye candy is nice, it’s often distracting as the game often becomes a mere “pixel hunt”, scrolling the mouse over every part of the screen in order to find something important to the particular quest. Another annoying aspect of this is that there are containers have to be checked to find an item, then that item is used to solve a riddle, and then the container has to be checked again to find another item for another quest. Once this is realised, the game isn’t that bad, but until that point you’ll find yourself literally trapped in certain parts of the game wondering what the hell to do!

While most of the solutions to the puzzles can be gleaned logically by listening to the dialogue and watching the game closely, some are just so completely idiotic you want to scream. For example, there’s one part of the game where Brian needs oil or grease to fix a rusted machine gun. There’s a small pool of oil in another location, and a bucket elsewhere. Logic would lead to putting the bucket in the oil. However, Brian won’t do this. Instead, you have to put sunglasses in the oil, swap the sunglasses with those of a drag queen who is obsessive about her tan, then ask for her tanning oil! However, there are really only a few of these, and successfully figuring out what to do in parts does become really rewarding.

“Point and Click” adventures used to be all the rage in PC gaming, but that’s died off in more recent times. Although games like [I]Sam and Max Hit the Road[/I] and [I]Monkey Island[/I] are fondly remembered for their humour and fun, they don’t seem to live up to modern gaming values. Who wants to play a game you’re only ever going to play once? Where’s the reply value? Where’s multiplayer? These are some of the problems faced when looking to buy such games, because these values DO matter, especially when games cost nearly $100. If funny adventure games really float your boat, then go out and buy this game, otherwise give it a miss.