In the past 5 or so years, there have been few adventure games. Save for the revived Sam & Max series, the later Broken Sword games or Dreamfall, not a lot of people can name other adventure titles. Back in 2003 (or 2001 if you’re in Spain), Pendulo Studios released Runaway: A Road Adventure, a point n’ click 2D adventure game. Filled with witty humor, colorful characters and some relatively decent visuals, the game managed to put another heartbeat in the relatively dormant adventure genre. Lo and behold, the game managed to garner some fans (namely in Europe) and a sequel is now set for release next month for the U.S. — it’s already available in Europe and Spain — titled Runaway 2: The Dream of the Turtle.
A demo was released recently (it includes a recap of the first game) which samples the 4th episode in the game. The story revolves around Brian and Gina (both starred in the first game) vacationing in Hawaii. During a plane accident, Gina is lost and Brian has to go rescue her. The sampled demo level takes place in Alaska, for whatever reason, and you have to help your pal Joshua, who ingested some nasty berries. Trekking through the cold, you’ll be doing the usual adventuring, which means nabbing items, combining items in your inventory and using them on various things through the game. For example, you’ll meet a bear enthusiast named Ben. Unfortunately, he’s missing some parts of his bear suit, so you’ll have to do some improvising to complete his suit. In turn, Ben’s bear suit will play a key role on the revival of Joshua.
Even though the game is in 2D, the visuals have some tweaked details. All characters have shadows, footprints will appear in the snow as Brian walks and the general cel-shaded visuals of the game portray the game’s world pretty well. Character animations are well done, though I found that if your character begins to do his generic idle animation, it’ll have to end before you can move. As you trek through the various parts of each level, I found that there are no loading screens; each level transition is smooth and quick. In the full game, there’s supposed to be over 100 different levels, so we’ll see if that smooth transition holds up.
The dialogue in the game is pretty extensive, and the embedded humor in the lines is hilarious; even Brian’s comments when you try to combine two items that don’t go together are pretty funny. You can tell that the game developers took the time to incorporate real-world parallels, too. The voice acting is really well done, and everything has full voice-overs.
The game is, at heart, a full-blooded adventure title. Unfortunately, the developer decided to go a little overboard in some situations. You will experience plenty of hovering your mouse over the entire screen to look for a specific item — usually hidden — to activate, take or move. While some adventure gamers love this tactic, others will get a headache. Some of the puzzles can be a noodle-scratcher, but most of them are relatively painless.
Runaway 2: The Dream of the Turtle may be a runaway success, if it lives up to its predecessor. The first game sold over 600,000 copies overseas, which led to this US endeavor. According to reports, a 3rd game is already in the works, too. Nice 2D visuals, plenty of adventure gameplay and bright characters clearly mark this as a fun adventure game, but we’ll have to wait for the finished product to be certain..
