Life can be strange, one moment you’re on your way to the book store, the next moment you’re in the biggest adventure of your life. It can happen to anybody, and that anybody is Brian Basco, the hero and good guy of service in Runaway: A Road Adventure.

The game comes on three cd’s and if you install it completely on your harddisk it takes about 2 Gigabyte. Normally you shouldn’t be juggling cd’s anymore when changing chapter but that’s without counting the way the developers brain works. First you have to go past the Starfox copy protection which asks for the first cd and once you’ve passed chapter you you’ll be needing cd2. If you only have one “coffee drive” in your pc, you’ll be juggling cd’s like a true DJ after a couple of hours of play.

The storyline unfolds through an ingame movie and during the game you’ll get to see more of those. Normally this isn’t bad because the characters move a bit smoother and can do more different moves compared with the normal gameplay but they do have a downside: they’re not your everyday format. The necessary codecs are installed with the game, but on certain pc’s (including mine) these will give problems and show an upside-down image. With installing FFDSHOW and tagging the “flip movies” option you can fortunately resolve this problem.

Once in-game – which can take some time as you can’t skip any of the cutscenes or movies – you can start a true point&click adventure. When going over an object or person with your mouse, the cursor will change to the icon of the accompanying action like a text balloon, a hand, etc… Switching between the actions can be done with the right mouse button, easy as pie.

The game itself is completely in English with (Dutch) subtitles. Overall, the voice acting is rather good and the subtitles are decent. Sometimes they are kinda cuddly but of course we understand English J
What bothered me though was the fact that several characters with a small role tend to use the same voice. Deformed or not, it’s very noticeably.

The storyline is pretty good. Our hero gets some mobsters after running and corpses tend to pile up. Everyday stuff for a gamer but not for our Brian who’s hardly anything but a nerd. You’re on your way to the book store and can’t help but drive against some beautiful girl. Being the gentleman that you are, you bring her to the hospital and just before she passes out because of the narcosys, she tells you that she’s being pursued and that “they” want to kill her. Of course you can’t just let that happen and from that moment on the ball starts rolling. You start in the hospital and end up in a deserted ghost town where three alternatives have found their home. Meanwhile you’ll get to deal with ancient indians, a seance, freaks who want to make contact with aliens, and the “unexpected” plot change.

Runaway: A Road Adventure is a must have for every adventure fan. Except for a couple of downpoints (which can be fixed) it’s a game that kept me busy for a reasonable amount of time. The puzzles can give you some brainwork but are solveable with some common sense.