Review of Runaway: A Road Adventure by Lucien21

After running down Gina with his car on a New York street, your character Brian finds himself on the run from the Mafia. With his life in danger at every turn Brian goes from New York to Chicago and a couple of desert locations in the hope of solving the riddle of the indian crucifix and get the mafia off Gina’s back once and for all.

It’s just as well she is pretty as Gina spends most of the game missing in action for one reason or another (Coma, Captured, Dead, and injured) as the lust struck Brian invokes the help of a variety of quirky character from a trio of transvestites, to a rastafarian and a cute computer hacker.

What some people will do for a bit of slap and tickle is hilarious.

Graphically the game still looks great with all the various locations and characters looking fantastic for most of the game. The cut scenes are starting to look dated but don’t detract from the fun. It’s a colourful and exciting world.

The audio work is varied with some of the character voices being a bit bland and the musical score can be at odds with the tone of the game at times. However the main characters are distinct and add a certain flavour to the game.

The most frustrating thing about this game though is the puzzles and the item mechanics. While most of the puzzles are logical and a lot of fun there are some of them that are just plain bonkers. The peanut butter puzzle for example is a bit WTF.

This isn’t helped by the occassional item being too small and hard to locate making you treat most locations as a pixel hunt to ensure you didn’t miss that small nail or hand vacumn cleaner. It also doesn’t help that some items are only available after you trigger their need or by searching locations more than once. There was a couple of times I was stuck because I never thought to look somewhere that previous told me was useless junk.

Overall the plot is crazy and the characters quirky and I had a lot of fun with it. The occasional niggles with the puzzles were annoying and dragged the game down a bit in my opinion. However the worst part for me was that I didn’t get any chemistry at all between the main characters. Gina is hardly in the game and I felt Brian had more attraction with the Sushi character towards the end that I think he chose wrong in the end.