Runaway: A Road Adventure

If romance novels had a video game this game would come close to looking like it.  Runaway: A Road Adventure is an animated point and click adventure game with a very polished production.  It stars a goofy physics graduate, Brian Bracco, on his way cross country to Berkley from New York City to start his graduate research under a prominent professor in his field.  While taking a detour through the city to pick up a book he had on order from a local bookstore he hits a mysterious and beautiful damsel in distress, Gina, with his car by accident and rushes her off to the hospital.

At the hospital he finds out Gina is a club singer on the run from the mob.  The mobsters had targeted her father over a crucifix he had slipped her before being captured and tortured to death by the mobster's hit-men.  Being of course the dashing male lead he agrees to take Gina with him on his cross country trip and help her find the truth behind her father's death.

As I mentioned before the game has a very high production value.  Although the graphics are your cell shaded cartoon style the images are well drawn and meticulously detailed.  Cut scenes are very slick but stylish to the key of a romance novel told from the perspective of Brian.  The voice acting is melodramatic but done in humour.  The producers have also an original professional soundtrack reminiscent of 90's soap pop rock to support the dialogue-less parts of the story.

Unfortunately underneath the polished surface the game is not perfect.  Like most point and click games I have played up to this point I find myself resorting to brute force tactics at certain points of the game randomly clicking for that one spot and inventory combination to get me through the next event.  Already twice the essential item was just too small to notice or beside a lot of other non essential click areas.  I have as well encountered puzzle events which did not have a logical progression of thought.  There is (for example) an event that's triggered in scene 2 of the game when you cause a character to break something by accident.  I had no idea that this was the intention of Brian when you get him on this rather complicated chain of events.  I find these badly planned story arcs remove from the emmersiveness of story and detracts from the experience of feeling smugly clever - possibly one of the main reasons I play point and click games.  Runaway: A Road Adventure can be found on Steam for $9 USD.