Challenging puzzles
If you’re looking for fast placed gameplay you won’t find it here, but you will find an extensive adventure that looks great, is high on humour, abundant with charm and riddled with clever puzzles. While getting to grips with some tricky puzzles, the intuitive user interface ensured that we never became frustrated with the point and click’s staple diet of obtaining items and using them to solve puzzles by interacting with the environment.
In Runaway 2: The Dream of The Turtle players can explore more than 100 different locations dotted around the globe, including Alaska and Hawaii. The story focuses around Brian Basco who heads off on a trip to Hawaii with his stunningly attractive girlfriend (if you get off on cartoon drawings that is) Gina Timmins. The plane crashes and whilst Gina has bailed with the only parachute on board the craft, Brian ends up safe on terra firm, albeit trapped deep in the jungle, with no sign of his lover. From this point forth, Brian begins his search for Gina and on his way he discovers a secret military installation which, of course, he investigates.
Click for larger imageAt the heart of the Runaway 2’s gameplay is inventory questing and thankfully the interface is well designed to cope with dragging items onto the game screen or experimenting with mixing them with other items within the inventory menu. Like any decent point and click adventure, the puzzles are challenging and we were stuck scratching our heads on numerous occasions after we’d seemingly tried everything. Despite needing to re-trace our steps on numerous occasions, the hotspots are fairly easy to find and you won’t need to go through the pain of pixel hunting. By moving your cursor across the screen, a magnifying glass will appear to aid you in your search. However, the icon doesn’t change when you hover over an object that you can interact with and instead you’ll have to click the right mouse button to bring up a hand icon. This doesn’t necessarily mean that you’ll be able to interact with an item either and you may instead be subjected to the humorous dialogue that accompanies any attempt to mix objects with items that make no sense.
Click for larger imageIn the preview version that we played one of the puzzles involved Brian getting a password from one of the other characters, Joshua. Unfortunately, Joshua has made himself ill from eating berries and, true to form; you’ll need to solve the puzzle by searching the location, picking up objects and using them in order to progress. A hint was given by a nearby NPC that pointed us towards catching a salmon from the nearby river. So, after finding a chainsaw we worked out that we needed it to break through the ice in the river in order to catch the fish and by extracting gas from a nearby pick-up truck and mixing oil in the oil dispenser we were able to power the chainsaw and solve this part of the chapter. There’s nothing remarkable about the variety of items you’ll pick up in Runaway 2 – spark plugs, a bottle of bleach or a whistle amongst others – but, you do need to approach the puzzles in a novel and interesting way.