It's a mixed bag that I can only really recommend to old school adventure game aficionados. The puzzles can be pretty lame in their nonsensical logic or the proverbial hunt the pixel game for that one item you are missing to be able to make any headway while searching through several screens worth of pixels... also the story itself is... well amusing if you like cheesy, trite, and hackneyed plots with a supposedly genius protagonist that acts like a moron throughout.

Basically a pretty underwhelming effort that you can skip at your leisure. Give it a go but don't be afraid to just go straight for a walkthrough so it doesn't feel like too much of a waste of time.

Runaway: A Road Adventure is the first game in Runaway series made by Pendulo Studios, back in 2001. It has its ups and downs, coming into a résumé of being cheesy and needlessly complicated with a crude, childish charm on the side. It is only interesting enough for an old school adventure gamer, who wouldn't mind empty character stereotypes.

Let's see... There is an interesting variety of graphic and art display used in this first game; including old school hand drawn cartoons, slightly computer animated skylines, 2D characters wrapped with vibrant colors in gameplay - similar to original Broken Sword series - and creepy plastic 3D models used in between cut scenes. It feels that someone failed to pick a homogenous art style for this game. 2D models + hand drawn cartoons is a great combination which we are already used to from older adventure titles, but 3D models? Well... I personally think the 2D + 3D artwork combination is a tricky one, and it wasn't well produced here. Some of the character designs were okay, but they mostly ended up being exaggerations of stereotypes. Brute and ugly rather than being funny, and character movement animations - especially ones from Chapter 2 and Chapter 3 - were downright spastic.

I don't know a lot about you, but a strong and unique protagonist with well-arranged character is really important in adventure games in my opinion. For the acquired immersion, you have to like the main character, or at least find him/her interesting. Brian Basco was neither likable nor interesting. For a supposed boy genius, he spoke and acted as a real dimwit who ends up becoming a Ken doll stereotype eventually. Gina - the supporting female character - isn't anything interesting or genuine either. She is there to live up to the labeled existence of being an exaggeratedly sexy bimbo.

The scenario is meaninglessly complicated and it seems that our characters have no actual control over any occurrence. On a series of quite random and unfortunate - or amazingly fortunate events - they manage to get by, but there is no exact brilliance to their progress. They always go through any kind of progress through the help of absurdly friendly random individuals with eccentric backgrounds that they meet around. The story itself is so fragmented and scattered, it doesn't really make any sense until the last chapter of the game. During the last chapter, every random plot hook are properly arranged and tidied up by yet another collection of random people - not our protagonist. In all events and occurrences, Brian Basco may be one of the most naive and ridiculously shallow characters in adventures games that I've played so far.

If we are to talk about gameplay, I have to confess that it has a ridiculously slow progressing game play for a ridiculously fast progressing storyline. There is odd repetitions in actions and with the speed Brian moves around, you'd better spare a whole day. It is a killer pixel hunt to collect items, or even notice that certain items are actually collectible. Some item combinations are just fine, the others... well, without a walkthrough I wish utmost patience for you. NPC interactions and dialogues are pretty much straight forward, but even though you'd be pretty confident about what you should do, the game forces you to either confirm that through making Brian realize the needed action, or at least try what you absolutely cannot do first as an elimination process. It ends up being tiresome after a point.

All in all, Runaway: A Road Adventure is nothing miraculous. There is a great selection of adventure games you'd enjoy without a doubt. This is not really one of them if you are not a fan of cheesy character stereotypes and crude elementary level humor. I've been hearing a lot of good things about the other games in the series - especially Runaway 3: A Twist of Fate - so I'll finish the series to get there anyhow. Apparently, story arcs follow each other with references so it is not possible to thoroughly enjoy the last game without playing the prior ones. Take this one if you are curious enough, or wait for my reviews in other titles in the series!

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When I play adventure games, usually I like to play a compelling protagonist, solve ingenius puzzles, and meet a colourful cast of interesting characters. Unfortunately, Runaway fails on all counts, and then finds some more levels to fail on, in case I was not sufficiently put off from it with it's sheer audacious ineptitude alone.

The art, while competent in it's backgrounds and interesting in the execution of the cel-shaded comic style, fell short when rendering the characters, whose bodies float around while their mouths snap into keys, a discordant, stilted animation method that only serves to both highlight the failings of the watery bodies and the limited mouth animations. The character designs ranged from by the numbers boring, to overwhelmingly offensive and reductive. Racist stereotypes pop up again and again, gentle and unassuming, as if the writers thought nothing of their inclusion, with a literally yellow faced asian lady at one juncture, and a Tojo-style bucktooth japanese stereotype popping up later. The game seemed to take great pleasure in exaggerating features that weren't part of the caucasian face. While Brian and Gina were bland to the point of soporific, some of the supporting cast were so caricatured as to make them inhuman. The resulting mashup was incredibly distracting, and often insulting. It didn't fit together well.

The puzzle design was some of the worst I've ever seen - and unquestioned in it's sociopathy. Oftentimes the solution to a puzzle is to destroy some great work of art, or a career, or simply make someone's life worse for Brian's gain. Other puzzles involve leaps of logic so great as to bring into question the world this game was made in. Filling lipstick tubes with gunpowder, for instance, apparently makes for bullets. In what sane universe would this not just melt the lipstick and cause a jam in a gun? And Peanut Butter made by heating butter with some peanuts. Not only do the puzzle solutions often not make sense, but are literally antithetical to the goal you are trying to achieve. Brian will, at times, do something that is counterproductive to his aims for no real reason other than to prolong the game's running time. He is also an incredibly inconsistent hypocrit, refusing to steal some things because "he is a decent guy" and gleefully stealing and destroying other items because "they won't miss it". The amount of unquestioned property damage in this game is staggering. I was actively rooting for something horrible to happen to the protagonist by the end, as he got everything he ever wanted and more, as he complained about being lied to while lying out of his ass at every opportunity, and as he made everyone's lives a living hell while they did nothing but be accomodating to him.

From the very beginning, the insufferable Brian Basco comes across as a bland, entitled dudebro, whose complete disregard for his fellow human beings' safety is only matched by his lack of personality traits. I can only sum him up as some kind of dark, unfathomable void-beast who wants to go to Berkley University. In his quest for getting the female supporting protagonist, Brian poisons, strongarms, and causes the death of all who get in his way. He is unaffected by the death of friends, loved ones, and nothing bad that happens around him ever seems to stick - upon being told to not mourn by a Hopi Ghost, for example, he instantly feels better and snaps back to being the insufferable twit that he normally is.

Mentioning the Hopi, an important point has to be brought up. The Hopi, in the game's setting, appear to be a extinct tribe that have only a presence through spirits and ghosts, when in reality the Hopi are still a political presence in Arizona, with several towns. It reinforces the awful "Native Americans are Already Dead" tropes that resonate throughout media, which is part lie and part incredible racism, of which this game has in spades.

The story is at it's heart, forgettable, but only through Brian Basco's audacious awfulness is it elevated to a travesty. The twist in the plot takes five out of six chapters to come to fruition, and it is such a damp squib of a twist that you question why you even bothered with the game in the first place. The game's setup promises intrigue that the game ultimately does not deliver on. It barely engages more than morbid curiousity, let alone any proper intrigue. The game sets up a mystical element that ultimately only serves to give our hero yet another item and a pat on the back when he loses something. The love interest element is sickeningly underwritten and overemphasised, mainly when our hero reminds the supporting cast, and the player that he is not gay. His love interest spends most of the time unconscious, indisposed, or absent. What spark they could have had is never shown on screen, just that he thinks she is beautiful, and ergo he needs her. And she wants him for an unknown reason, probably because he hit her with his car and she needs protection. She is an eternal damsel, and her story is never expanded upon, even though it is far, far more interesting than his,

Describing Runaway as a power fantasy would be completely apt - Brian Basco represents the nadir of the human being, but still gets everything he ever wanted while reassuring himself, and being reassured, that he is the Decent Nice Guy Who Gets The Girl. It is almost sickening how pornographically this game presents us our "hero", in the sense that everything he does brings him everything he ever wanted, he never faces any real, lasting trauma or tragedy. No character development, just a stagnation into the awful person he always was, and will always continue to be.

Runaway is exactly what you should do when faced with this game.

Many crucial items blend with environment and/or are too small to see.
A lot of points can be interacted with only if some mandatory trigger happened.
Also, several nonsensical solutions.

All this makes the game far from the brightest star in the point-and-click genre.
The game is dirt cheap on sale if you want it, but I would rather recommend watching it on youtube.

If The Longest Journey is the death of the classic adventure game, Runaway is the beginning of the real "dark ages" of adventure game design. This is the game that defined pixel hunting with every screen containing at least one hotspot as small as a couple pixels, sometimes next to much larger hotspots just to intentionally obfuscate what you're supposed to interacting with.

The second big flaw is that protagonist Brian exists separate from the player, meaning he won't do anything unless he -- the fictional character -- has a reason to. This results in many frustrating elements where Brian will ignore background details until interacting with it much later after new information is revealed. In the first chapter alone you search an inventory item to receive a new item but you must search it again later to reveal another item despite Brian explicitly saying "there's nothing else useful." This is something even Sierra didn't torture the player with.

Combine this with lots of time wasting tedium -- one "puzzle" involves filling a water boiler but you can only fill up a little at a time asking the player to walk across 8 screens round trip SIX TIMES -- and Runaway represents the worst aspects of the genre. I'm surprised this series has done as well as it has but really it just shows how starved adventure gamers were in 2001 before the new renaissance of the 2010s.

A tolerable point & click unfortunately weighed down by unforgivable sins of the genre:

Pixel hunting. Yes, you will scour every inch of the screen thinking you've seen everything, only to find a stray nail four pixels wide that blends in entirely with the scenery. Even worse is having literally two pixels to click on once you've inserted it into its target position. Worse still, in the desert area of the game where every outdoor screen is littered with rocks, you're supposed to pick one of them up. Of course you've already hovered your mouse over hundreds of them so naturally you won't think to click on THAT one.

Moon logic. Ah yes, a doctor's bag full of useful tools. Surely opening it once would allow me to take all the necessary items at once. Nope. You take them out one at a time, and you need to re-check that bag several times AFTER talking to characters at specific points in order to get new items. Worse still are items the main character flat-out refuses to pick up, despite the obviousness of its necessity, UNTIL you've talked to someone who says you need that thing. Probably the worst case of moon-logic I can recall from my playthrough is finding a replacement AA battery. There's a guy downstairs who has a working tape player, and even offers to give you the battery for $100, but nope. Turns out you need to take the dead battery and freeze it in a canister of liquid nitrogren (with a ladel that is also several pixels wide and blends into the background.)

Unlikeable main character. Brian, an extremely ordinary student, has zero personality. He's not interesting or funny. He is however, cowardly and selfish. The man is eager to destroy or steal other people's property, or put other people into dangerous situations, in order to save a woman he immediately fell in love with because she's a stripper and he's horny or whatever. Case in point: early in the game you need a woman in a museum to restore an artifact to discover its purpose. This woman is under a high level of stress with a heavy workload trying to restore a large number of historic items in time for an exhibit in three days. Brian doesn't convince her to help him. though. He simply alters some of her equipment to destroy the object she's working on, then tricks her into fixing his first. She later passes out after drinking some questionable fluid he's fed her. No problems with this, but he absolutely refuses to read some hidden documents on moral grounds. Yeesh.

Other minor gripes are the red herring objects that serve no actual purpose to trick the player into running in circles and the awful theme song that gets shoehorned in various forms into every chapter.

If you CAN look past these flaws, and are willing to look up a guide occasionally (seriously, some of these items you will STRUGGLE to find without help) then you might enjoy it. The art is actually quite nice, and the music sets the atmosphere for each area quite nicely. The story is very middle of the road, and was likely penned with Broken Sword in mind, but it serves its purpose.

If you lower your expectations, give it a go. Otherwise don't bother.

This game is one of the worst experiences I have had, though I suppose part of it can be forgiven considering the age of the game. The game starts right off with you saving a barbiesque girl from some thugs. The protagonist is sure to tell the audience direcly about how beautiful the girl is and that this the main reason why he won't refuse to help her. The game is contradicting at times between the antagonists wanting to kill the girl at first, but then after catching her they want to interrogate her. The game also weirdly dips into native americans and then the supernatural, before ending on a relatively normal note. The final revelation of the plot is probably the only thing interesting about it. Mostly, the game seems to take itself too seriously for how bland it is.

While the models are simple and cel-shaded, the animations leave something to be desired. Talking animations often appear to be 2-frame mouth open/mouth closed animations. Interacting with people is often delayed while they finish an idle animation they are in the middle of. Characters aside from the main ones often stomp or shuffle around in ways I can't tell to be intentional or not.

The first few 2 chapters had some decent puzzles, but afterward it is increasingly difficult to determine what you are supposed to do. There are multiple times when you have an idea of what to accomplish, but with no idea of how it relates to your current goal. As the game approaches the end, the puzzles seem more like exercises in mind reading on the developers. At one point I had to give the name of a movie director and one of their movies to another character as it was tangentally related to a solution for a problem the protagonist had at the time. There was also a time when I was to cut a "rock hard" object with a knife that had been heated, because it would cut better. A third one involved throwing a basketball to a particular character because they were secretly used to be a famous basketball player. In none of these scenarios did I find any clues to the answers.

A few other bullet points:
- One part of the game involves you performing the same task 5 times, each time taking about 6 room transitions.
- The end of the game gets pretty tedious as you repeatedly leave objects for other characters to examine, leave the room, and come back.
- There are also times when a searchable object or container will need to be examined multiple times or at different times before new needed objects will be available to be picked up.

Ok I'm writing this review having finished Chapter 2, because I am currently pondering whether to continue or not.

Graphics:
The cut scenes are dated and painful, but the in games graphics are fine. A little clunky but fine.

Puzzles:
Hit and miss. You start the game in a hospital room with a girl, but no real direction. From my persepctive I just wanted to leave the room or take her out, instead I had to work out that what the game wanted was a contrived solution to a problem that may or may not exist and would only work in very specific circumstances. Don't get me wrong I love point and click adventures and they have contrived answers, but they tend to layout the problem first. While I continued with the hope that this would change, it did not. There are some good ones and there is potential there but its just not great.

So why the negative?
The main character is instantly dislikeable and not intentionally. The script could have done with some editting and you spend a large amount of time in prolonged, boring and tedious cutscenes.

Why I might continue....
Ok with all this said there are two solid reasons why I might continue this game. They are "Yesterday" and "The Next BIG Thing". Both excellent solid games, with fun puzzles, intriguing stories, interesting characters. I mentioned potential earlier and these games show that Pendulo allowed that potential to come to fruition. I kind of want to continue this game as I know that the studio is capable of a lot more and there are more games in this series which could potentially pick up.

Overall:
Unless you have the same attitude like me, avoid this game. Buy Yesterday, The Next Big Thing, Gemini Rue and Shardlight if you are looking for fun Point and Click Adventure games.

As a veteran of point-and-click games I eventually had to pick this one up (part of an heavily discounted Pendulo Adventure Pack). I have played plenty of games from the genre and they all come with their flaws and thankfully have their respective merits. Long story short - I had yet to play an adventure game I didnt enjoy. Had...

Honestly, I could never really get into this game. From the first room I ran into trouble progressing. It is no news that some adevnture games contain illogical or infuriating puzzles, but usually you get the hang of it by carefully reading the dialogue and/or exploring. I had to heavily use a guide, when I usually refuse to use guides at all, as they destroy the purpose of those games but in the end I prefer it over examinating every pixel in every room every time you progress a little bit. When you can only progress by trial and error, fun gets work and finishing this one was alot of work.

I must have been high when playing this. Bad game, not approved.

One of the worst point and click adventure games I've played so far. Pretentious over complicated plot with uninteresting setting. Tedious pixel hunting needed to solve a lot of puzzles. Solution to a lot of puzzles make no sense in a lot of cases. Playing this crep without a game guide is infuriating. I couldn't take the main character seriously and there's also cliche love story of the hero falling in love with a sex doll which is so dumb.