Runaway: A Road Adventure review

Did you know adventure point and click games require skill? 

Oh yes! I admit, throughout my gaming "career" I have tried and given up on these types of games several times. Lack of patience and general restlessness put into me from action games, made me into an adventure game newbie. With help from two people: one an adventure game veteran, and the other with a master's degree in logic, I humbly watched them play and asked for tips.

The best tip for adventure games for when you are stuck, they said: combine everything with everything everywhere, even if it doesn't make sense. Sometimes especially if it doesn't make sense.

Runaway: A Road Adventure is a pleasure to play! Game is goofy, funny, smart, has a few meta-jokes and isn't even afraid to laugh of itself. Style of art is charming and beautiful to look at and explore. Characters are funny (I mean, who doesn't like mobsters? I want more games with mobsters!). The story is interesting and made me constantly come back to the game to see what happens next.


I don't really know what the standard of difficulty in point and click adventure game is nowadays. I did play some of Grey Matter and Lost Horizon previously, and both of them had this almost insulting feature to turn on pointers at every object you can interact with. Runaway: A Road Adventure didn't, and it felt as if the game treated me with some respect, as if it was telling me that you can solve this, you dumb ass.


The game gave me too much credit.


I was stuck several times, and had to revert to some hints on the internet. I am weak. But to my defence, the solutions I looked up were hints, not direct answers, provided by this awesome place: http://www.uhs-hints.com/. Difficulty in Runaway is pleasant, but makes you work for it. It was entertaining to be presented with a scene with tons of hints, and you sort of know what the goal is to proceed to next chapter, but you have no idea how for example a bottle of tanning lotion and a handful peanuts is going to help you deal with a mobster or two. It is like a well-written crime novel: everything fell into place unexpectedly and surprisingly a few times. And that is the thing I discovered with adventure point-and-click games: they are the closest you can get between a game and a book. All you do is look at a screen, point at things, think, listen and read a story. There is no stress about WASD'ing around, jumping, or aiming at heads. Just make a cup of coffee (with three spoons of sugar) and relax with a good story. 

I drove my car that night, and little did I know..

I met a ton of funny and weird characters of all shapes and sizes, visited some very hot and dry wilderness, had a run-in with the mob, experienced some stuff that would have made it into an X-files or Fringe episode, and produced a few things through processes that would make MacGyver proud.

Time played: 14 hours