Runaway: A Road Adventure Preview

One of the greatest Spanish publishers (well, at least one of the most famous ones) Dinamic Multimedia joined efforts with Pendulo Studios once more intending to provide players with one good adventure game. I said 'once more,' as the same team created a game called Hollywood Monsters a couple of years ago. Unfortunately, most of the world did not get to see this excellent little adventure as it appeared in a most awkward time for adventures, back in the 3Daccelerator-hype-days... And as Pendulo already had one misfortune even before that, when they published Igor: Objective Uikokahonia on 386, we can only hope that this project has more luck than its predecessors...

Well, there certainly seems to be room for optimism here as things went for the better recently. After Grim Fandango, and especially after The Longest Journey and EFMI people don't look down on adventure games any more. Especially not on adventure games featuring heroines with humongous hooters. And not only did I spend hours pestering developers to send me any pictures of the lovely Gina, other news sites "accidentally" started showing interest in adventure gaming and posting all screenshots that would appear.

Runaway is a genuine 'classical graphical adventure' (I have to admit that I feel a bit silly using this expression, as it is now hard to imagine playing adventures without graphics). And it would be a real shame if we did not have graphics, as we wouldn't be able to see Gina in that case. Unfortunately, this game isn't about her. It's about some guy who looks just like an ordinary guy with no bristols or anything of any interest for that matter, but hey, I guess we'll just have to get used to bearing his presence; dough! Brian (for that is his name) is a near graduate, when his life gets interesting all of a sudden; well a tad bit too interesting as some weird criminal gangs started chasing him... How and why? He seems to be clueless, and his best bet is to run and save his hide, and then later try to find out why they're after his hide... As I'm still under impression from The Ward, this story did remind me of it, except that it takes place in NY 2000 rather than in outer space.

This plot further evolves into a strong involving story, and you'll soon get to meet your new companion Gina the stripper in a hospital (hoo-(te)-ray :). In a hospital? As Gina doesn't lead an upright politically correct life like Brian, she managed to, hm, "borrow" a large sum of money she shouldn't have - and now she and Brian have something in common; as the Jews like to put it: The mob's got a thing for them.

This is only the beginning of Brian's actual growing up and changing from a secluded person to someone who has to get in touch with people in order to solve problems and get out of sticky situations. To make things more difficult, the people you get to meet during your "road adventure" will be somewhat peculiar... like the drunk Mexican holy-man, hired goons, or old native American Indian -- altogether fifty of them. Each of the characters will have a strong personality and AI routines never before seen in games like these. All this should make things more difficult for Brian, because he won't be able to distinguish first hand if somebody really likes him, or wants him pushing up the daisies... The better you are at realizing what they really want, the more chance you have to survive.

The controls in Runaway are classical point & click adventure controls. Player can explore the world around him, search for objects to collect and later use, talk to people... etc... the best thing about this game should be the original, well conceived and relatively hard puzzles. The people who played Hollywood Monsters claim that the logic, time and dialogue puzzles they saw there were some of the best they have seen. And just like in 99.99% graphical adventures, everything in the game will be linear, and the difficulty will increase through the 100 available locations...

And speaking of graphics, at first it seamed as if Runaway was an ordinary, classical 2D adventure with neatly drawn backgrounds and characters, but the truth is much different. Runaway is using a relatively new NPR (non-photo realistic rendering) technology we had a chance to see in Red Storm's Shadow Watch, which renders 3D graphics into pictures that look as if they had been hand-drawn.. To put it more simply, complicated 3D scenes are run through various filters in order to get more simple scenes with fewer polygons. In this specific case it makes the game look like an animated comic book. This engine should be capable of various light effects, shadowing and full-screen antialiasing in resolutions up to 1024x768x16. And if you add some thirty minutes of high quality animations and finally get an engine that can work on a Pentium I 166Mhz with 32Mb RAM, 8X CD-ROM and a 2MB video adapter, well you can be sure you did a good job.

An appropriately advanced MIP Music System follows this visual experience. It's not as revolutionary as NPR, but it serves the purpose of improving the atmosphere following the story and throwing in an occasional Sheryl Crow - Garbage - type of tune from time to time.

Er, do I have to point out once more that this is going to be a real treat? I think that goes without saying... As Pendulo Studios is just about to finish the development, we can soon expect to have a playable demo available on the net, and the complete game right after that in stores. Until then, keep downloading those screenshots and FMVs...