When aliens and assholes collide.
When you enter a point and click adventure game, you pretty much know what you're going to get. You point, click, progress through what's hopefully an engaging story. Runaway: The Dream of the Turtle does all of those things with an occasionally decent sense of humor and a cool cartoony art style. The puzzles, also a mainstay of point and click adventuring, run the gambit from logical to lame. The grand result is a game that has a healthy helping of frustration with a light frosting of fun on top.
One of the most important aspects of an adventure game is the story. Because there's no action to draw players along through an otherwise slow environment, the dangling fictional carrot has to be pretty tantalizing. The premise of Runaway: DotT is ridiculous enough that you actually do end up wondering where everything is going even if it takes a while to really get into groove. The story follows Brian Bosco and his girlfriend Gina (both holdovers from the first Runaway game) as they run into trouble after going to take a tour of the fictional Mala island on their Hawaiian vacation. Brian quickly finds himself stranded on the island while Gina is shot and at the bottom of a lagoon. From there, Brian meets with all sorts of crazy characters including more that fans of the original will recognize.
Part of the problem with the story probably stems from the anemic voice-work. The main character Brian Bosco doesn't seem phased by the fact that he's been nearly killed by several different things nor that life beyond Earth exists. He just moseys on, as mellow as can be, while his loving girlfriend is missing. Nothing later on in the game experience seems to make much of an impression either. Of course, Brian is a total doofus, which is part of his character, but he's just not very likeable. While Brian's voice work occasionally has more personality as the game goes along, the rest of the cast is a big hit and miss. Characters like psychopathic smartipants Archbald are fun to listen to, but Brian's friend Sushi is boring as all hell and both Joshua and Rutger (obviously voiced by the same guy) are like nails on a chalkboard.
All that said, the game does have some good cutscenes. Not all of them are paced appropriately but others have a ton of animated personality and fun. The brightly colored cartoony art style really lends to the adventure well. Environments are detailed and great to see. The major problem is that the developers didn't make it easy enough to find certain objects in the environment. One of the very first puzzles requires an object to be found in the middle of quicksand and it's near impossible to see. You'll need a lucky pass with the mouse to see the cursor change to know that anything is there. Unfortunately, the desire to make the interactive objects not stick out so boldly also makes them blend into the environment pretty easily.
Let's take one of the middle puzzles as an example. Brian, at one point, is supposed to go fishing for a salmon. Without going into too much detail about the way it's done, he needs to use a hockey stick and a fake bear paw to do it. I made the mistake of figuring that out right away and tried to combine the two objects together to make a fishing device. Poor Brian says "I can't see any reason to do that," which of course, confused the crap out of me since the paw didn't work by itself and everyone had been talking about how bears catch salmon. After wandering around looking for other devices I became frustrated, walked back to the hole and decided to try every object. The hockey stick allowed me to try and fish but wasn't successful. Seeing that I at least was able to try the hockey stick out, I once again, with hope in my heart, tried to use the bear paw with the hockey stick. It worked. Why the game wouldn't allow me to use the "logical" solution immediately is beyond me. I probably should have figured it out given that the game had basically required me to use the wrong solution before being able to use the correct one at other times before this, but that's just stupid design to an otherwise decent puzzle.
©2007, IGN Entertainment, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Don't let the pretty pictures fool you; this adventure game hides a pretty dark heart.
I love adventure games. While the genre has shrunk quite a bit since the heyday of LucasArts and Sierra's classics, it always warms my heart to see a developer try to keep that classic spirit alive. That's why I had high hopes for Runaway: The Dream of the Turtle, the sequel to the 2003's Runaway: A Road Adventure. Its design and presentation is an unapologetic throwback to the halcyon days of King's Quest and Day of the Tentacle, and Pendulo Studios, the game's developer, deserves kudos for that. Unfortunately adventure games can't slide by on good intentions and great artwork. They need challenging-but-not-ridiculous puzzles to overcome and great characters to root for and a great storyline to enjoy. Runaway fumbles all three categories, putting this in the "one to miss" pile.
The basic premise certainly has potential. Brian Basco, self-described "adventurer-by-accident" is on vacation in Hawaii with his girlfriend Gina "Trouble Magnet" Timmons. When they want to take a day trip to Tiki Falls, their rickety airplane crashes and Gina herself parachutes into a mysterious lake where she is shot and slips to the bottom in the game's very exciting opening cutscene. Basco himself guides the plane to a crash landing and wakes in the middle of the jungle determined to find his erstwhile girlfriend. What follows is an allegedly wacky adventure involving crazy members of the U.S. military searching for an alien weapon while Brian and his friends try to keep it from their hands (and maybe find Gina in the process).
As crazy as the premise is, it matches the beautiful and slightly surreal art style. Runaway's art is an interesting mix of stylized cartoon and cel-shaded 3D characters and is easily the game's strongest quality. The game's storyline ventures all over the world from the Hawaiian jungle to the Alaskan wilderness to the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean and all of it, without exception, is beautiful. Character animation is smooth and elegant and every cutscene is directed with an eye toward interesting camera angles and dramatic scenarios. The scenes of Brian swimming to the bottom of the ocean to explore a sunken pirate ship are breathtaking and while the human characters are more than a bit stylized, all of them look great and are a pleasure to watch.
When it comes to puzzles, Runaway commits virtually every crime in the adventure game book of no-nos. The game is filled with pixel-hunting, logic-tortured item construction, pitch-dark rooms filled with valuable objects, and important areas that have their entrances artfully obscured on the screen. Often the game won't let the player do what needs to get done without going through a convoluted sequence of events or conversations despite the fact that what needs to happen is obvious.
One early puzzle, for example, involves putting whisky into a toy dog. Before Brian can do this, however, the game forces you to try it with water first. Why? I know I have to get the monkey drunk! What kind of puzzle forces the player to come up with the wrong solution first? A later puzzle involves Brian climbing up the wall of a cargo hull using magnets. I knew what I had to do immediately, but Brian couldn't figure it out until I had him take yet another jaunt through about a zillion game screens to one of those artfully obscured points I previously mentioned so he could have a developer-scripted "revelation." The game even pulls the classic "limited-use-object" conundrum in which using an item in the wrong place makes the game impossible to finish. All the game was missing was a pointless maze and it could have been 1989 all over again.
Even insane puzzles might have been forgivable had the game's storyline been worth following. It's not. It's not that the premise is bizarre; there have been plenty of classic adventures with weird storylines. The problem is that the game's dialogue, pacing and editing are absolutely atrocious. Every line that comes out of a character's mouth is an impossibly overwritten tangle of words that betray a translator (the game was originally written in Spanish) with a good technical knowledge of English but absolutely no ear for how it's actually spoken. The game is filled with pointless scenes that come from nowhere, go nowhere, add nothing to the story or character development but take forever to wade through. Worse yet, Runaway commits the unpardonable sin of any comedy -- it's just not funny. Every so-called "joke" is telegraphed from 600 miles away and is so clichéd I doubt it was funny even in the original Spanish.
Part of the problem may be that many of the game's characters and situations betray an adolescent and arguably offensive world view. Many of the game's characters border on being racist or sexist stereotypes -- particularly Joshua, a mad Japanese-American professor with Coke-bottle glasses and buck teeth who wouldn't be out of place in a World War II propaganda cartoon. The slutty Hawaiian bombshell Lokelani, a resort bartender who lives in a hut with "Happy Hooker" over the door, is basically used by Brian as a prostitute without him actually having the integrity to pay her. A huge plot point in the early game involves Brian disguising himself in what is essentially blackface in order to sneak onto a military base. A puzzle sequence culminates with Brian sending an inoffensive nature photographer off to be raped by a bear. The game's main villain, Colonel Nathaniel L. Kordsmeier, is presented as a cigar-chewing stereotype that enjoys gunning down women and children every chance he gets. In fact, the dark and sinister portrayal of all the U.S. Army characters is at odds with the otherwise light tone of the game and serves as a distraction from the story.
The game's storyline and puzzles aren't a complete loss. There's a self-contained dream sequence on a 15th century pirate ship, which is everything the rest of the game wasn't. It contained interesting, well-designed and fair puzzles that didn't require a huge amount of traveling. It also contained the majority of the game's few funny jokes. There were a few nice digs at adventure game conventions, some homages to classic adventure game titles and one very funny bit where Brian manages to stuff an entire room full of treasure into his pants. Had this sequence been the rule rather than the exception, Runaway would have been an easy recommendation.
In the end, Runaway: The Dream of the Turtle is a failure. Despite the excellent art, and even ignoring the frustrating puzzles, the biggest problem here lies in a group of obnoxiously stereotypical characters working their way through bad dialogue and a poorly plotted and paced script, topped off with three horrifying words: "To Be Continued…" Best of luck, Mr. Basco. Succeed or fail in part 2, you're going to do it without me.
©2007, IGN Entertainment, Inc. All Rights Reserved