This game made me aware of Pendulo studios which makes good point&click adventure games but are not very well known developers.
Runaway 2 art style and atmosphere reminds me of Broken sword, but I can’t say it’s a copy f that game. It has its own soul and that's the most important thing.

As always in point&click games gameplay consists of collecting any garbage you find on the way and using it or combining with something else. And of course talking, a lots of talking accompanied by a nice story and good voice acting.

We have a charming male character named Brian and his gorgeous friend Gina(that scene at the beach, I will never forget it) as main characters. Brian and Gina goes on vacation and as you may have guessed it goes all wrong. Plane crashes into the jungle, Gina jumps off with parachute and Brian crashes into the trees and your journey begins.

Graphically the game looks really nice, there are a lot of locations, they’re all different with its own mood and atmosphere. From jungle to snowy Alaska and even your dreams.

Puzzles in this game can be really difficult to solve. Sometimes they don’t make sense. I was stuck on an Alaska level for a few hours until I looked up the walkthrough. The game could use a hint system or something because it’s really hard sometimes. But nevertheless I loved the game. Exploring the beautiful environments, talking to people, learning about their lives is fun. And it’s really interesting to get to know the side characters and uncover the plot.

I wish Pendulo would update all their old games with achievements and trading cards, that would generate some sales for them.

I strongly recommend this game to any point&click fan. Interesting characters, challenging puzzles, great story and beautiful locations combined makes a really good game.

Pros

• Great graphics
  
• Nice story
  
• Good voice acting

Cons

• Some puzzles are too challenging
  
• Would be nice to get an updated version which would include steam features

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In some ways, an improvement on the first Runaway game, in others, it's not as good. If you enjoyed the first game, I'd pick this one up for sure, but I probably wouldn't recommend approaching it without. The first half of the game is set in beautiful tropics and the colour and art is actually really nice. Some... interesting writing and a few annoying puzzles, but the last half hour will be some of the most frustrating that you will have ever experienced.
It is probably best as a buffer between Runaway: A Road Adventure and Runaway: A Twist of Fate, but if you like Pendulo adventures, this is clearly one.

Positives:
- beautifully drawn backgrounds and the cell-shaded character models look good (unless in extreme close-ups, which the cutscenes love to use)
- sometimes(!) the main character is, for your convenience, very smart when solving puzzles and will automatically combine the correct items if they are in the inventory, or even pick up needed, but trivial to obtain items without further input required (e.g. early on, stranded in a jungle, you can't reach an object, and Brian automatically gets a branch to pick it up with)
- hearing Jon St. John is always a delight

Neutrals:
This game is truly unique. What other game has your main character spend a significant part of the story in blackface, and a Japanese-American side character whose design comes straight from WWII "Slap a ♥♥♥" propaganda, whom you cure of amnesia by feeding him sushi, since, "due to his Japanese blood, he must like sushi" (Actual reasoning in the game dialogue)?
Whether this constitutes a hilarious middle-finger to an oversensitive world of political-correctness-gone-mad, or quite simply cringe, is up to you to decide.

Negatives:
Oh boy. It's not a good sign when a goofy side-quest about a weirdo trying to contact aliens is chosen to become the central story of the sequel. The plot spends little time on the rails and is told in large parts in awkwardly paced flashback and exposition dumps (oh, and watching characters communicate via online chat and having to wait a realistic amount of time for their counterpart to type and send the response is truly riveting).
It's clear that the writers where struggling as the later sections of the game fall completely apart, the crown jewel being the main character teleporting to a new setting between chapters and suffering amnesia how he got there, so side characters can deliver the events in dialogue (with "don't worry about [plot issue], we've taken care of that. It's no problem anymore" being an actual line).

Speaking of dialogue, the wording is frequently awkward and unnatural, as if the script was translated from Spanish by someone who's not a native speaker of English, or was really struggling to translate Spanish idioms and language quirks. You'll often have confusing lines where, for example, a characters says "No problem" to a request, but means "No, there's a problem".
There are several sections where you have to repeatedly initiate dialogue, only for the (LENGTHY) dialogue to be repeated verbatim.

But all that's nitpicking, if characters are endearing and puzzles are fun, right?
Well, regarding characters, the writers have the unfortunate tendency to confuse "quirky and eccentric" with "obnoxious", in fact, all characters seem to have made it their mission to be as obnoxious as possible. Of course, uncooperative characters (that you then need to convince, trick or get rid off as part of the puzzle) are a staple of adventure games, but here, you feel the game is just trying to waste your time, main character included. Brian will routinely comment on correct actions with your stock adventure phrases "I can't pick that up", "There's nothing there", "I can't use these items together", only to, after a comedy beat, say "Wait, I see something" or "Wait, if I attach it like this..." and then the puzzle works. It's a funny meta-joke for adventure fans once or twice, but it become old REALLY fast.
It doesn't help that Pendulo's idea of making nerd Brian "cool" for the sequel (which he obviously must be now, having scored the hot babe) was to turn him into a douchy dudebro.

As for the puzzles, "moon logic" is often the term - it's the kind of stuff that makes even an adventure fan understand some of the vitriol that detractors raise against the adventure genre. The game's most unforgivable sin in this respect is that it punishes you for being clever: Brian will refuse to pick up, use, or combine items if you haven't "unlocked" the "idea to do this" or "need to do this" via dialogue or looking at the right object yet. Now it's great if adventure games give clues and hints that way, but to make it mandatory to find them is a terrible design choice. However, to be fair, in those cases Brian will usually say something to the effect of "I don't see a need to do that yet" instead of the generic "I can't do that" to let you know that you're on the right track, but that doesn't make hunting for the "epiphany trigger" any less frustrating.

All these flaws compound and exacerbate each other in a way that make the overall experience a teeth-grindingly annoying slog, even with a guide in hand (the recommended way to play the game, for your sanity's sake).
If you just want to sit down and have a fun few hours with enticing brain-teasers, AVOID this game.
Only play this game if:
- you are an adventure game completionist
- you are into ironic enjoyment and/or masochism
- you are a game designer or have a scholarly interest in game design and you'd like some examples of what NOT to do

PS: Dear Spanish people: is "jumping around and slapping your own behind" a common visual metaphor for "s*xual activity or s*xual excitement" in Spain? Because that happens repeatedly in the game.

It's bad. It's really bad. Everyone that says so is right. I have enjoyed many a Pendulo game, but this one takes the cake. I'd heard the Runaway series was not great and I had bought it years ago and I was always hesitant to play, but finally I started playing them and I got to the second game and it was so bad. It was anger inducing bad.

Brian has become a grade-A d-bag. Other reviewers have said this, and it's absolutely true. He has become the kind of guy that no one likes. You want bad things to happen to him. I mean that is enough to make the game bad. No one would be interested in a sequel if it weren't for that character.

Despite how much I disliked playing as Brian let me sum up a few more things. Puzzles make no sense. NO SENSE. Whatsoever. They are so unintuitive and there are so many objects that just aren't obvious you can interact with. This carries over the problem of the first game where Brian won't interact with an object or pick it up until it's useful which "makes sense" but it doesn't make it easy and you don't remember that after advancing the game a little you probably need to try everything all over again to see if Brian will do something new now.

Ultimately I'll play the third game, even though I didn't enjoy this one. I've come this far I may as well finish the series. Who knows. The third game might be better. I've heard it is, and certainly Pendulo's later games have been very good. I have my fingers crossed.

Well... Here is the continuation to Runaway series, Runaway: The Dream of the Turtle, made in 2006. Aside that little bit of factual definition, there is not a single good thing to say about this game. If you've played the first game and declared it a tasteless, tacky and overcomplicated little adventure full of character stereotypes as I did, be warned: This is way worse than the first game. At least, the first game was working properly!

Adventures of self-acclaimed genius Ken doll Brian Basco continue from where we left him: on a vacation in Hawaii with the oversexualized bimbo stereotype Gina who he ended up as lovers beforehand. Thanks to a series of unfortunate - and mindlessly obvious - wrong choices, Brian ends up surviving a plane crash to only get stranded on an island invaded by military forces, missing Gina without a clue to her whereabouts. How...very...convenient. As before, his story will start with a destined accident and progress to become ridiculous, fast pacing and needlessly complicated over a short period of time. Buckle your seats, and be ready for alien conspiracy theories.

First and foremost, I really have a problem about the story execution in this game. In the first game, we went through a series of absurd events and got blessed with miraculous luck so random strangers with extraordinary talents and means ended up helping us regularly to get a happy ending. Brilliant. Here in this continuation, the same dynamic applies - but the game is needlessly extended to present the illusion for the presence of a game time. The first 3 chapters that take place in Mala Island are somewhat consistent with the main story if not harbored with annoyingly superficial humor and aroused teenage level sexual remarks. The rest of the game is an unbearable story anchor for situational comedy purposes mostly. The whole chapter 4 is only there to serve as a situational comedy during a supposed intergalactic emergency! Look, I can appreciate absurd humor, I loved every single moment of Monkey Island series, but there is nothing funny about deliberately feeding a complete stranger to a polar bear's sexual frustration, just because Brian decided to icefish at the spot the bear's standing! It's plain disgusting.

Aside a slight improvement on graphics and in-game animations, the game uses the same character design, 2D environments and a combination of 3D modeled cut scenes alongside 2D dialogue sequences among characters. Gosh, even the design choice is over complicated here! Fair warning: 3D cut scenes where Brian talks to Sushi, beginning from the start of the game, are spastically slow for some reason. Speaking of bugs, first 3 chapters of the game work fine, but the game gets unbelievably slow when you reach 4th Chapter. It takes a couple seconds to even move the mouse from one point to another. I think it's a problem with the snowing animation. I tried everything in my ability but couldn't find a way to mend it so I ended up closing the game and finding a YouTube playthrough to watch the rest to learn the story. This bug occurs with both Windows 7 Pro and 8.1 Pro. Be warned.

As before, game logic is flawed - not letting you go for the obvious solution before trying everything else to be rejected properly is our main thing. But ask yourself this: what kind of dimwit of a protagonist gets snow shoes to his inventory in a tropical island and leaves first aid kit behind, after a plane crash??? Such is our game logic. Puzzles are somewhat simple, but story progression and dialogues are a pain to go through. I'd vote for "nope, surely there is something better to do".

If you enjoy crass humor and are fond of "It was aliens!" skets - and able to forgive not being able to play half the game - sure, go for it. Otherwise, avoid it. Yeah, I will still play the last part of the series to get done with it and write a review. I know, I know. I love my community...

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The second Runaway game is more beautiful and even stupider than the first one. If you like immature sex jokes and rampant racism, and don’t mind horrific plot dump dialogues, you may have some fun, but otherwise just skip it. (It’s not even needed for the third game.)

Runaway: A Road Adventure was a beautiful, but overcomplicated point ‘n’ click with ridiculous puzzles, terrible voice acting, and a story that eventually turned out to be quite nice in the very end. The Dream of the Turtle has no redeeming factors other than better graphics; everything else is worse.
Much, much worse.

The voice acting will make you cringe, especially after you meet Joshua, who is the most offensively racist stereotype you will ever see in a commercial video game, ever. And, again, this is the smaller issue.
The larger problem is the plot, which is beyond stupid. Not because it is about unravelling a government conspiracy about aliens– real, actual, tinfoil suit wearing, bug-eyed aliens–, but because it has no direction or story structure: things just happen out of nowhere without rhyme or reason. Also, the humour is mostly sex jokes. Very childish sex jokes.
The insane, but entertaining characters are also replaced by one-dimensional clichés. Brian is now a goatee-wearing muscular douchebag who cheats on his girlfriend while she is being held in captivity. One of the antagonists is a military operative dominatrix with spider fetish. And don’t we ever forget Joshua, whose entire role is to extend all puzzles by ruining your initial solutions.

On the topic of puzzles: get a guide. Don’t even attempt to play this game by yourself. None of them make any sense, and they are so overcomplicated even walkthroughs can get entangled in their stupidity.

Is there anything good in this game besides the graphics? No, but the final Runaway title will redeem the series, if you manage to stay on board…

After the not-so-smashing effect the first Runaway game had on me, I was a bit wary of the second. Unfortunately, I was more than right.
To make it simple, the second game is like the first one in almost every aspect, only more so. That means the visuals are even better, the music... well, it's not quite as good but still superb - and that's where the positives end. The characters are either a-holes or idiots, our protagonist being the prime example of the former class. And he's not even funny, because that, according to Handsome Jack, would make it OK. But no such luck. The story is... when you look at it, it's almost non-existent. You spend huge amounts of game time achieving trivial feats (via non-sensical puzzles half the time), while the story stands utterly still. You click through diarrheic dialogs which advance neither story nor character. You try to figure out what to do next when what you have to do is click through all discussion with a character again. And to top it all off, the game finishes without any solution - we get another idiotic rant by Brian (our supposed hero) and a half-a**ed attempt at team spirit. I wonder who has any mind playing the third game after this - for me it would feel like a burden.

I love small studios who try to achieve big things, so it hurts me to downvote Runaway #2, but I was so far from enjoying this game that it can't go any other way. Sorry.

Runaway, Dream of the Turtle is the second installation after Runaway , Road adventure which I also played. Those games are made in the typical point and click adventure styles which was made famous by classics like Monkey Island or day of the tentacles in the 90s. Those games with some others made in the 90's are seen as the pinacle of adventure games, with their smart puzzles, great stories and humour, a golden age which is gone. Although adventure games are not as numerous or famous as they once were, they are still around in the new millineum with various grades of quality and enjoyment.

Runaway , Dream of the Turtle, developped in 2006 is made in this spirit, a new take on adventure games with better graphics and newer functionality . I liked Road adventure , the first Runaway, well enough and it seemed Pendulo which developped the game had even more ressources to make this game, with better graphics (2,5 D animations some places) , nice, cartoony and longer cutscenes, more characters and longer story than before.

But I rather think this game is inferior to the first for several reasons:

The characters:
Where to start? the main character, Brian Basco, which was sympathic if not very interesting in the first installement, has become a arrogant douchey prancing in eurotrash cargo pants with a goatee on top of being boring and annoying. As a main character, he is also not a very nice person. During the game he basically two-times his girlfriend (who he is supposed to save) with the local bimbo on an island, then he litteraly pimps out his newfound lover in order to advance the plot, very classy. On another instance he throw a character who actually wanted to help him litterally into the arms of an lustful polar bear, for an unclear destiny of either being maimed or violently violated. He might have gone away with it if the scene was funny, but it wasn't , my reaction was of pity and discuss mainly...

He get a little less annoying by the end of the game, but it's too little too late...

The other characters which help or counter our "hero" are not much better,it's a mixed bunch of annoying and forgettable clichè characters , some of them are bearable. in a few instances they might bring a smile on your lips, but don't expect much. The ones that are really annoying like Joshua will make you cringe, just think of something nice while they are in a scene...

The Graphics:
Honestly for a game from 2006, they're pretty good, the backgrounds are colourful and diverse and save the whole game from being a complete chore. The characters if you look away from their personality are cartoony and nicely done, my main critic is how frozen they look and how unnatural they're moving around. You could get away with it in 1994 when everything was pizelated, but I kind of expected better animations from the 2000's. The sounds and music are forgettable but ok.

The puzzle.
Nothing revolutionnary here, the normal point and click routine. While some of the puzzles are ok both in complexity and logic, some others are really hard and arcane, and you end up trying all kind of combination or to save time and your nerves, check a walkthrough.

In few instances I manage to solve a puzzle by luck , I couldn't help but feel bewildered by the unlogic solution. Other times , the whole setting didn't make sence, like when you have to solve a rather complex chains of events to get a measly notebook from another character while roaming in a huge and expensive multimillions dollars yacht full of expensive stuff.

To be honest the puzzles in the game are no worse than in many other middle of the road adventure games, but they're not better either, if you put on top of that a rather unlikable main character and annoying surroundings, it just makes thing worse.

The story and dialogs
The story is rather forgettable and not especially intersesting, which would have been ok with good characters and nice and witty dialogues, but Runaway , The Dream of the Turtle has none of that. It could have been if the writers had put more time in designing their characters to be more interessting and put some humour in the game through the dialogues. But instead we've get one liners that aren't even remotely funny and strange situations that don't make sence, since they were intended to be humourous but weren't.

The creative minds behind this game this put some effort in putting most of the poor female characters in vaguely sexy skimpy outfit , probably to appeal to the more juvenile segment of the player with a bit of softcore . But it end up giving the game an almost mysoginistic feel since most female characters end up being just eyecandies at some level.

Conclution:
It's definitively not the worse adventure game out there, but it's really not among the best, it's barely mediocre. I didn't hate playing it, but I definitively won't repeat the feat. The sad thing is that it could have been a lot better if they had put better writers to bring up more interesting characters with better and humourous dialogues.

The shakiest part of the Runaway trilogy builds on the previous game bringing everything that you liked (or didn’t) in full force. The road is a bit rough, but views are great, and the company is fun!

The story picks up not far from where “The Road Adventure” left off with Brian and Gina enjoying the cash they scored at the end of the last ordeal, spending it on an island vacation. A seemingly innocent, although adrenaline-fueled activity of skydiving forces Brian to push Gina out of the plane just to watch her being shot at and fall into the lake below. That, in turn, triggers a set of events so outrageous that it will take Brian from sandy shores of Mala island to Alaskan wilderness, to the depth of the ocean, and even to the past for a bit in what may just be one of the most madcap adventures out there. Brian is largely on his own in this game, but we’ll meet some characters from the first installment and get introduced to a new colorful, crazy bunch.

If there’s one thing no one usually argues about in Runaway games is the stunning visuals, and “Dream of the Turtle” carries this torch with pride. Beautiful cartoon graphics, full of mind-blowing vistas and millions of lovingly drawn details are painted in vibrant, lively colors. The animations are top-notch and add quite a bit of humor into the narrative with subtle movements and expressions. The overall slick presentation stands out even though over a decade has passed since the release date, solidifying Pendulo Studious reputation as brilliant artists and becoming the calling card of the trilogy.

The gameplay gleefully continues down the road started in the first part of the series - being dialogue and inventory manipulation heavy. On one side, there’s unbound creativity with which you can use items and the imaginative variety of the inventory itself that fit perfectly into the madcap world developers created. On the other - head-scratching logic that might feel like it serves a sole purpose of making game harder, and pixel-hunting moments Runaway can’t seem to do without. Gameplay here is a combination of crazy fun (entire Chapter 6 homage to one of the classics of adventure gaming is guaranteed to put a smile on your face) and frustrating “Why would you do that!?” moments that feels like a well-traveled, but bumpy road.

Twisted plot – a specialty of the Spanish studio and the factor that keeps the game way above the level 10 of absurdity - will take a player not just across the globe, but dimensions and hallucinations. Government conspiracy, extra-terrestrial element, cold-blooded fashionable killer with a penchant for arachnids, military operations and futuristic technology all co-exist in this wacky, “no-scrutiny allowed”, implausible universe that never takes itself seriously. It’s wild, waaaay “out there” and perfectly self-aware. Same goes for the characters that are being built around making fun of every stereotype, generalization, and objectification in existence unapologetically. Most people who didn’t happen to like “Runaway: a Road Adventure” had problems connecting to the main characters and game’s shameless insistence on mocking any social issues and human behaviors they saw fit, so the word for the disappointed but hopeful ones – “The Dream of the Turtle” boldly proceeds with the same self-set trend. For those who happened to like the first game – multiply everything by two. Or ten.

The writing is relatively smooth, but for the cumbersomeness that occasionally raises its head. A few golden one-liners (courtesy of Colonel Kordsmeier, especially), sprinkled among not quite as successful joke attempts, make for a game of a few chuckles and smiles, never quite breaking into an outright high-quality comedy but managing to carry over-the-top story in a solid manner.

Voice-over is well done aside few cases of using the same actors for small but prominent characters, which manage to catch attention but not matter enough to put it down as a negative. Sound effects, on the other hand, are of excellent quality, reflecting if our heroes speak in the large cave or with a diving suit on, building up the atmosphere and immersion. The music is pleasantly unobtrusive, changing theme from chapter to chapter yet never taking over entirely. As with the case of the first game, there’s a catchy theme song that sets the right mood for the kind of wild romp that’s coming up and making you want to… well… runaway from everyday routine for a spell.

Despite its frustrations and kinks, the unavoidable pull of “The Dream of the Turtle” is that craziness and silliness with which the outrageous and stylish escapade marches on into absurdity never taking itself seriously. Runaway trilogy is known to be a divisive title in the adventure community, prompting lots of “love it/hate it” feelings, so the second instalment would be much more appreciated by the fans of the first game and potentially disliked by those who didn’t enjoy it, as the game takes everything from before and then revs up the intensity. For those who never played what has now become a point’n’click classic “A Road Adventure” (first part) - it’d be good to start from there, if possible, just to find out if Pendulo Studios’ universe is your kinda cup of tea; otherwise you’re looking at a solid game, wrapped in a layer of fantastic visuals with uneven, but still wildly entertaining gameplay.

I love adventure games. I do. And I lkied the original Runaway way back in the days of VGA. But this, despite having gorgeous art, and the point and click modality down to a science, is a "skip it" game. Pendulo has to have some of the worst dialog and plot writers working in games, or their translators should be horsewhipped...it's hard to know who to blame. But either way, the dialog and plot are stereotypically gawd-awful. And the puzzles suck. Suck hard. No happy ending either. Just a "to be continued" at the end of the game. Skip it. Really.