Reader reviews for Runaway: A Road Adventure

While it may be a valiant attempt to recreate the magic of one of the best adventure game series of all time, the execution falls flat in innumerable ways.

There are some good things about Runaway, like the controls and the UI and the environments. But by far, the best thing about this game is the beautiful, hand-drawn graphic design, under the art direction of Rafael Latiegui Antón (whose credits include Igor: Objective Uikokahonia, Hollywood Monsters and Yesterday). Detailed, colorful, very pleasant to look at. The animations are also well done. This is the only silver lining. It’s all downhill from here.

The one puzzle I really liked was Joshua’s dimensional door combination puzzle. The tobacco-making puzzle was pretty good. Some of the early puzzles are decent. The vast majority of the puzzles were heavy on the moon logic, which is a major problem even when the solutions are hinted at in the dialogue. Some critics don’t mind that the puzzles are illogical because of the dialogue hints. I don’t mind dialogue hints when necessary but the goal should be to try to make it so the player can see all of the pieces and put the solution together themselves using their own logical foundations. It seems like Runaway did not put care and attention toward puzzle logic and instead lazily tried to make up for it by dropping hints (well-placed or ill-placed) in the dialogue. Even when you can figure out a puzzle solution that way, it’s not nearly as satisfying, because you’re not using your own sense of reason — you’re just trying to figure out someone else’s faulty logic.

Examples of moon logic in this game: Using a crowbar on a motorcycle to make a footrest fall off, using sunlight to instantly melt ice and cook food, combining lipstick with gunpowder to make a bullet, dipping sunglasses in oil so that someone’s skin will look tan, throwing a basketball to Lula to prompt her to tell you that she used to play basketball, dropping a pot into a trough from a second story balcony to make a key fly out, and… the only way to get the thugs’ attention is to blow up an oil well? Seems a little extreme.

Runaway also makes you examine the same objects multiple times throughout the game without implying that you need to re-examine them. The worst example is the briefcase. First, you unlock a jail cell, find a briefcase, search it to find liniment (a bit underwhelming given that there’s an ancient dead body in there, but that’s beside the point). Then you have to search it again to find a stethoscope after Sushi gives you a hint about a safe combination. In the final chapter, you have to search it yet again to find a scalpel after you get some pods from a branch that you can’t slice open (don’t ask). At no point is it ever implied that you need to re-examine the briefcase. And this of course led me to wonder what else I’m supposed to be re-examining. Everything? That would be a tedious waste of time. If you want the player to re-examine something, you should make it evident, because otherwise players will assume that since they’ve already searched it once, it’s not going to produce any more results. But in this case, it’s even worse, because you literally can’t find the second and third items in the briefcase until their triggering events happen. How are you supposed to know that those triggers went off? There needs to be some hint because you can’t expect players to go over everything multiple times throughout the game. This also happened with a few other objects (Gina’s bag, medical book, gardening shed, skeleton), but with only two items instead of three. There needs to be a name for this profane phenomenon, because this happens a lot in adventure games and it needs to be blasted into the hall of shame.

The worst puzzle in the entire game has to be the train puzzle. You see this water tank on a tipped-over train and you know you’re supposed to fill it up (you don’t know why), but all you have is an oil can and it’s way too small to fill it, so you’re stumped. You decide to try the oil can anyway. You’re able to fill it with water — good sign. Then you go to the train and it lets you dump the water into the tank — another good sign. Now you try to pull the lever to let the steam out (again, you don’t know why), and it still says there’s not enough water. Okay. Now what? Do you try something else or do you try the same thing over and over again? The rational mind wants to try something else, but nope. You have to keep going back to the saloon, filling it with water, and dumping it in the tank, FIVE TIMES. There’s no indication that you’re supposed to keep doing it. Even if it did occur to you to do it multiple times, you’d probably stop at three. Who in their right mind would keep trying it if they’ve already tried it three times and have achieved no results? And get this: the whole point of blowing the steam out of the smokestack is to blow a key out and, I can’t emphasize this enough… There was absolutely no way of knowing that there was a key in there! There was no way of knowing that there was anything in there! Up until I saw that key, I had no idea why I was filling up the water tank five times. And if you don’t happen to see the key flying out of the smokestack, you’re likely to miss it, because it completely blends into the background making it the most hidden object in the game. This must be one of the worst adventure game puzzles of all time.

Brian often refuses to do things because there’s “no reason”, even though the player may see plenty of good reason, and yet he will pick up the most random items with the flimsiest justification. He said he only wanted to take things from the jail cell if it’s “absolutely necessary”. So he took a bottle of liniment. Why? “It smells like mint.” Okay. There’s a ladder next to Mama Dorita’s house. You can examine it, but when you click the action button to climb it, Brian asks “what for?” I don’t know. What is the ladder for? Why is it there? Why am I able to click on it? Why am I able to examine it? Why is anything anything?

It’s ironic that Brian asks “what for” when I want to do something entirely logical that the developers intentionally put into the game, while he does things like defrosts and empties a giant freezer for seemingly no reason at all. Oh, and here’s a list of some of the wackiest things Brian inexplicably picked up along his journey: a jar of peanut butter; a deflated and unstitched basketball; an old, nasty bowl that someone was using to feed cats; an empty flower pot with dirt in it (“maybe I’ll find something to plant in it”); a pretty rock he found; and a shiny metallic object that turned out to be an ancient stapler (???). So don’t ask me “what for”. That’s what I should be asking you.

This game is packed full of hidden objects and a good amount of your time will be consumed by pixel-hunting. At this point in history, I think this is self-evidently wrong. Since 2001, when Runaway came out, the adventure game genre has mostly grown past pixel-hunting, and hidden object games now have their very own genre. I don’t think I need to say much about it other than it is abundant in this game. Here are just a few examples: a tiny nail in the frame of the mine entrance; the tomahawk near the statue; the firewood in the sheriff’s office; the levers in the train cab; the sanding block on the saloon balcony; the bucket under the cabin. Even the saloon entrance is hidden from sight underneath a balcony — you can only know it’s there by hovering your cursor. And to put the tiny nail in the coffin, the art design, while absolutely gorgeous, often makes it difficult to tell what objects can be interacted with and what is an inactive part of the background.

Voice acting gets a lot of heat in the reviews, and it is bad, but what’s even worse is the writing. Bad voice acting can be tolerable, sometimes even charming. Brian’s voice acting is cheesy, but combined with the poorly written narration and dialogue, it’s nails on a chalkboard. The other glaring example of bad voice acting is Rutger. One of the worst fake Jamaican accents I’ve ever heard. There’s no way bad writing can excuse that.

It’s a super lazy, generic plot. First of all, Brian accidentally hits Gina with his car and then decides to protect her from mobsters? Why? Because he thinks she’s hot? That’s not a strong motivation to risk your life and it doesn’t make for an intriguing storyline. For most of the time, Gina acts like a typical ‘damsel in distress’ solely to provide the main character with some raison d’etre. But then something really weird happens. Gina falls into a hole. Brian doesn’t try to save her. He immediately believes she’s dead and gone forever. So he sits and weeps for about 90 seconds while reminiscing about the whole two days they hung out, and then he gets up and continues on his mission with the new goal of just solving the mystery. Thus far, the mystery has taken a back seat to the shallow relationship between Brian and Gina, so the player has little connection to it. Then later he finds Gina and tells her that he left her for dead and he only coincidentally found her as he was looking for the Hopi village. She doesn’t even care. The characters don’t seem to express human thoughts and feelings. They don’t act like people. The whole story is very sloppily tossed together. It’s as if the writers thought all they needed to do was throw some ingredients into a pot, and they didn’t need to measure them or put them in any meaningful order.

The story is full of holes and continuity errors, there’s zero character development, and it’s so unfunny. I’m not going to go into examples on this one because humor is extremely subjective and I don’t want to ruin anyone’s good time, but I’ll just say my forehead is still bright red from all of the facepalming I did.

The characters often don’t seem to fit into the world very well. They seem forced, as if someone just came up with a random cast of characters and forced them together for no reason. It’s not a terrible thing, but especially with the plot and the puzzles and the writing, it’s hard to connect to them. It’s hard to see any rhyme or reason to them. It’s hard to see them as anything more than tools or obstacles or plot devices. They may have some charm to them individually, but when put in context, they seem like just another part of the game that was lazily and sloppily thrown together with little care. Even individually, they are very facile and self-centered and one-dimensional.

Also, if racial stereotypes and other forms of bigotry are a deal-breaker for you, then you can stop right here. It’s got just about every form of bigotry in the book. Even if you can look past it to find the good parts, there’s no denying that it makes the game uglier, darker and less enjoyable.

The score is good although it seems inappropriate at times. The theme song is just plain annoying. The worst part about that is I had the music turned off so I could listen to my own playlist, but for some reason they still make you listen to the Runaway theme song when you’re outside of the ladies’ trailer. I wouldn’t mind so much if it didn’t sound like a chipmunk with tonsilitis singing over a rejected track from a mid-90’s house mix.

I have a few more nitpicks. When you click the action button on Saturn’s water tank — it says you should ask permission before taking some. Fine, but if Saturn is right there in the room, why not just automatically ask him? Why make me go through the whole dialogue tree again just to ask him if I could have some water? You know what Saturn ‘s response was? “It’s just water.” Exactly. This happened a couple of other times as well. And again, it’s just a minor flaw but it’s an example of the devs not respecting players’ time.

Another one is when you’re mixing the water with the gasoline, it gives you the instructions but if you miss them (which I did), it doesn’t repeat them, which means the only way to progress is to look at the walkthrough. Given the bad puzzle logic, the faulty instructions, the low-quality clues, it’s hard to imagine that this game was properly tested before it was released.

Brian loudly bangs every 20–30 seconds when you’re on the inventory screen. This makes absolutely no sense. It only takes away from the player’s enjoyment by annoying the living daylights out of them for no reason, and also by interrupting their thought process. It has the negative effect of rushing players through their thinking instead of letting players take their time to figure out solutions at their own pace. And what are the positive effects? How in the world could adding these loud bangs to the inventory screen possibly improve the experience? Sorry, there’s no other word for it: it’s just dumb.

There is a lot of pointless walking, and there’s no double-click run.

Dialogue and cut scenes are unskippable. Some cut scenes are excruciatingly long. Good time for a bathroom break. And maybe go run some errands.

Settings don’t save, so if you favor custom settings, you’ll have to adjust your settings every time you boot up the game.

There’s no autosave. I hope your game doesn’t crash.

Runaway: A Road Adventure is a good example of how not to make an adventure game. It does a few things right, but there’s no way around it: the game is not fun. The story is uninteresting. The writing is abysmal. The puzzles are aggravating. If you just finished the Broken Sword series and you’re looking for something on that same level, look elsewhere. There are similar games out there that are much better and that didn’t even try to emulate Broken Sword. And maybe that’s the main source of Runaway’s flaws — it has no heart and soul of its own. It’s trying to be something that it’s not. In a review for Cubed3, a critic named Athenasios cited a Greek proverb: “in the absence of rain, even hailstorms are welcome”, meaning that there aren’t enough Broken Sword games and thus any attempt to recreate the magic of the series should be celebrated. I respectfully disagree. You can’t recreate that kind of magic. You have to create your own magic. Broken Sword was built on original ideas. It had a distinct purpose that was independent of other works. It wasn’t trying to be anything else. The developers formed the ideas in their heads and they worked hard to materialize them. You can’t do that if you’re constantly chasing someone else’s ideas. That’s what Runaway did, and I think that’s the main reason why it fails to stand the test of time.