Runaway 2: The Dream of the Turtle review (PC)

I generally stick to the same method when it comes down to reviewing games. I’ll play through and almost immediately start making notes on points I want to mention, and features that I feel will be useful to touch on in my review, and if I can find a slightly humorous or personal segue from my own real life experiences into the game’s review I find it helps to break a reader into my opinions of the game. Quite often I’ll get this section, and simple sections on presentation and style written early on, before completing a game since they have little bearing on my final viewpoint of the entire product, but having just pointed the last click and sat through the credits I feel obligated to start again from scratch. No longer will you, dear reader be amused by my tales of the joyous times I spent with Monkey Island or suffer my eternal comparisons between previous adventures in the hope to encourage you to take a risk and purchase Runaway 2, because I have been left with such a foul taste in my metaphorical mouth (work that one out) that I must get straight to the point.

Runaway 2 is a disappointment when compared to the first in the series (yes, we can expect another… more on that later), and when compared to many other modern adventures; and it started so well.

The thinking man’s genre (or woman’s)

Point and click adventure games are notoriously few and far-between nowadays, since LucasArts hasn’t given us one in a long while, not least because of the far increased production values apparently required, the expense of dialogue recording, and the financial risk of starting a new franchise (although I’d clearly buy another Monkey Island). The games tend to follow the same general play style of ‘use bone on dog with key in mouth’, ‘pick up key’, ‘use key on door’, and always seem to extend the plausibility of tasks as far as possible within the boundaries of logic and setting. Runaway was a great little reality based adventure in its own right with a clichéd but decent cast of characters, and some complicated but ultimately logical puzzles. Runaway 2 seems to extend the franchise into some kind of sci-fi mystery alien fest, taking one weak potentially dismissible event from the first game (Joshua’s alien interaction) and extending it into a full plot with teleportation devices, alien kidnapping, a death stasis pod and a hunt for an alien element overbearing any believability that the previous game had.

On loading the game, you have the (brilliant) opportunity to view a video clip showing what happened in the last game. ‘Previously’ reminds us of the characters, a few of the events, and sets up the kind of thing we can expect from Runaway 2, getting the returning player into an excited mood for what is to come. Then the game begins, and surprisingly delivers on many fronts.

The story centres again around Brian Basco, the hapless accidental adventurer who while on holiday in Hawaii is involved in a plane crash and must spend the remainder of the game attempting to find and save Gina, his girlfriend. The graphics and animations are superb in the cell shaded stylish manner in which they are presented. This goes from every little interaction being animated to the lip sync which while being simplistic is clearly accurate. So far so good.

The plot thickens

It doesn’t take long before the impressive completeness of animations becomes a little overdone when it comes to the cinematics. Rather than stick to a narrative style that is willing to skip forward through the boring bits, Runaway 2 tries to show you everything, every time. One section has you descend in your scuba gear down to a sunken ship, and back up again… and back down again… and up and down multiple times, sometimes in the same cinematic and insists on showing you the impressive, but repetitive animations. One section even explains that your diving ‘suit’ has an intercom, so you dive down, are told that you are looking in the wrong place, then decides you must dive back up and talk to the same person that was over the intercom in person for her to tell you to try inside the ship to which you decide to dive down again. Needlessly complicated for an event that could have been skipped by a quick ‘try inside the ship’ message over your radio.

Equally complete are the sound effects, which seem to be present and excellent for every little interaction that you might imagine. Just as overdone, but rightfully so, it seems that the game designers didn’t know where to stop when it comes down to what to show and what not to show. The voice acting is generally quite good, but sometimes very overplayed, perhaps down to the translation into English, and perhaps by the over-hamming of some characters’ voices that vary between naturalistic and surreal. A certain amount of overacting is required when creating a character through voice alone, but hearing Joshua speak just frustrates me now.

More audio stuff

I seem to have criticised the the audio quite a bit, but the music is excellent. Cinematics are scored well to the emotion as well as the action that fits with the theming of the game, and while it seems that some licensed (?) music is overused, it is nice to occasionally hear diegetic sound that could be playing in the background of the scene.

The importance of the animations and background events could not be clearer than during one scene where a character is recording a TV broadcast, and even though some puzzles require you to speak to him and interact with him, Brian, our lead character pauses for (honestly) nearly a minute until his spiel is finished before he will even approach him. How polite. Part of the problem with the game is that Brian isn’t particularly likeable. His jokes (and therefore the game’s) are weak and generally quite plain and his interactions with some characters sometimes made me wonder what the game was trying to say. Especially his interaction with Lokelani, a rather attractive barmaid that really diminish Brian in your book when he seemingly decides that despite his whole quest being about saving Gina, a little fun with Lokelani won’t hurt.

The meat of the game

An adventure game however, is made or broken by its puzzles, and Runaway does have plenty of them. Unfortunately they are generally of the ‘use strange item on guard to accidentally open it’ illogical variety and even when you figure out that you will need to grease up something to loosen it, where is the butter hidden? In a random bin. Make sense to you too? Unfortunately, you also have to make sure your character knows what to do before you can do it, even if it means traipsing half way across an island to tell someone that you are going to try something before the game allows you to attempt it.

This is refined more in one of the only non inventory puzzles that seems almost too simple. Late in the game, a safe cracking style puzzle takes your focus, and when I had exhausted what I thought were all my choices, I tried guessing the combination to find out that every time you rotate it to the correct ‘number’, it makes a loud clicking sound, giving away the combination before you even have it. Naturally the game won’t let you open it until you have completed minor sidetracking tasks to get seeds to feed to the parrot who then tells you the code. The exact same code that I tried, and on repeating it, the ‘safe’ happened to open. To add to my frustration (and I have no qualms in admitting I had to use a walkthrough to find out what I was missing,) the real solution lay on a new location, the entrance to which had been hidden behind a staircase. Pixel hunting is bad enough when you don’t have to pixel hunt for new areas to explore.

The Denouement

My review has obviously been greatly changed by the end of the game, and I am sure you would like to find out why. Let me put it this way; For the final chapter of a 6 act game, I find it utterly ridiculous that the hassle of the complex puzzles in this final act take place firstly in Brian’s dream, and secondly in a bad homage (read rip) of Monkey Island. Admittedly, this seems the best section for comedy, but upon waking up and having the revelation that the secret I have uncovered in my dream is already known by the conscious characters gives the entire act a sense of pointlessness that I very much disliked. For Brian to then utter that this has only been a taster of the main adventure they would still have to go through sends alarm bells ringing, and LeChuck spinning in his grave (before he was resurrected as a Zombie Pirate).

Yes, apparently there is no conclusion to Runaway 2: The Dream of the Turtle, because Brian doesn’t save Gina (yet), all of the villains are still at large, and finding an important alien energy source is enough for one game. The ending is abysmal, although it is nice to see that the crew decide to have a party to ensure that they feel that enough has been accomplished for one day.

This is not a complaint at the length of Runaway 2, as it has plenty of puzzles, as questionable as they may be, but not knowing that the game was meant to be a two parter is like buying Pirates of the Caribbean 2 only to realise upon watching it that you are obligated to see the third now before reserving judgement of the whole plot. Runaway 2’s plot is ludicrous and silly, but forgivable for its consistent universe throughout the game. If only I didn’t struggle through a pointless ending section to reach what is essentially a sign that says ‘episode 3 coming soon’, I wouldn’t feel the need to mark down the game so much. Bundled with the third one, when (if) it comes out, it may be a better purchase.