Old school point and click never looked so artistic!
Take an old school point and click adventure, add a well written script, chuck in some fiendish puzzles, a smattering good humour, glaze it all with some sumptuous graphics and leave it to marinade. What do you get… Runaway: The Dream of the Turtle !
If you had asked anyone a year or two ago about point and click and they would have said that it was a dead games type. However it seems to have had a bit of a resurgence of late, with games like Sam and Max leading the charge. The problem is that many great games from lesser know publishers go unnoticed. This is true of Runaway: A Road Adventure, the first Runaway game. I have to admit to having never heard of it!
With luck the same will not be true of Runaway: The Dream of the Turtle. To miss this would be to miss a real treat, one that has the production values of a movie and the same kind of game play and enjoyability as the old Lucas Arts adventures.
The game follows the story of Brian and Gina, starting in spectacular style with Gina being thrown from a crashing plane by Brian and parachuting into a lake in the middle of Hawaii. The actual game action starts with Brian awaking in the wreck of the crashed plane, deep in the jungle. Here, using standard point and click conventions you begin to explore your surroundings. Rolling your mouse of objects that can be interacted with changes the cursor accordingly. Clicking on an object then allows you to use it or pick it up.
As is traditional you have to fully explore everything around you, pick stuff up, try to combine things in your inventory and generally try weird tricks in order to solve the puzzles and scenarios that the game throws at you. Some of these can be very simple, others take a bit more lateral thinking.
Split into 6 increasingly strange and involving chapters, runaway represents a relatively long and involving story. Chapter 1 can be seen really as a tutorial, getting you used to the way the game works. The game really starts in chapter 2. Here you find yourself confronted with people. People who you will need to talk to to get more information about what is really going on on the island, not to mention to find out where Gina is! The main characters that you will talk to are all well scripted, however at times the delivery is a bit dubious!
One place that Runaway: The Dream of the Turtle really stands out for me is the graphics. Pendulo have really put some effort into the way this game looks. But rather than try to wow the audience with photo realism and the latest physics engine, they have tried to stand out a bit from the crowd. It looks like a painting. The backs are beautiful with a hand painted feel. The characters look like a cross between a Dreamworks cartoon and a cell shaded drawing.
All good so far, but there are a few things that take the edge off at times. As mentioned the voice acting can be pretty poor at times. Also the animation has a few things left to be desired. For instance facial animations are out of sync a lot of the time and the characters seem to walk about like Robocop!
Runaway: The Dream of the Turtle is a really well humoured, good meaning slice of classic point and click adventuring, which covers the four corners of the globe, pirates, soldiers, surfers and even aliens. It takes me back to the days of Lucasarts classics such as Full Throttle and Maniac Mansion. It is never quite as good as it could be, but it tries very hard and for the most part succeeds.
The Bad: May be too old school for some
Silver Y Award