Runaway - The Dream of the Turtle

Review from Phil - Sunday, 05 April 2009 @ 11:30am

I have a confession to make. I always claim to love adventure games. They are often subtle, beautiful, surreal and artistic. I love the storylines, and the character interaction. My confession is this: I don't like many of them, at all. I claim to be an adventure game connosieur, yet I haven't played nearly as many as I would have expected. THis is because the majority of thema re crap.

Why are they so crap? It's not due to any of the aforementioned attributes. It's the gameplay. It's not even the CONCEPT of the gameplay (most of the time). It's the execution. The puzzles. The choices the developers make when deciding what combines with what and where to stick Item #481 in order to progress. Most of the time, it's a pile of shit, and the puzzles make no sense.

Runaway: Dream of the Turtle is a prime example. In the first level alone, I was expected to cut pilot goggles to get the strap and make a slingshot from. I had to attach a "tool" to a magnifying glass so that the magnifying glass can be stuck in the ground and a ray of light can pass through it so that it can heat up and weld a key together. After that, I filled a toy puppy with whiskey, sat it on the ground, made the toy puppy urinate the whiskey, where a lemur would come down and drink the piss. So that I could climb a rock (after using "anti-slippage spray") without having the lemur come and knock me off. That's the simplest way to explain any of the bullshit found with this game.

This image makes no sense.

I understand that adventure gameplay is supposed to be item-based, but it seems no effort was made to have these puzzles make any bit of sense. How about finding parts of a gun to shoot that lemur in its bitcha ss face? How about eliminating the entire tool + magnifying glass section, and just hold the damn thing yourself while welding the key. Also, welding the key with a ray of sunlight? Please.

I was so pissed off at the stupidness of some of these puzzles it left a bad aftertaste in my mouth until I eventually gave up and ditched the game entirely.

The more I think about these obtuse puzzles, the more I realise how many adventure games fail. No matter how acclaimed it may be, you'll still end up wandering slowly back and forth through many different screens, trying every item with every object until you stumble upon the solution. A good adventure game integrates intuitive puzzle-solving with the story, and doesn't force a bunch of random items on you just to lengthen the game arbitrarily. This is what Runaway: Dream of the Turtle does.

As a PC port, R:DOTT does an OK job of fitting in on the small DS screen. The graphics are complex enough without being cluttered, and it's easy enough to zoom in on areas to hunt for items and navigate each screen. There is quite a bit of pixel-hunting, but I can forgive this due to the fact that you would have to do it on the PC version anyway. It's a solid port, but it's a shame that the game itself sucked to begin with.

Can't see your items? Yeah, that's because there's a stupid background.

The plot itself is about some douchebag (just look at what he's wearing) who crashes his plane in the jungle and his girlfriend is missing somewhere after jumping out. Or so I think. Apparently the game is a sequel to an earlier PC adventure game, where Brian (the aforementioned douchebag) was a nerdy guy but transformed into some pseudo-cool surfer dude. Lame. It would have been cooler to have a neurotic nerd waddling his way through the jungle instead of some macho punk.

The story itself is really boring, with NPC conversations often going on way longer than you really want them to. Ordinarily this means you would be keen to get back to puzzle solving and item collecting, but there's no real desire even do that. What's left is a game where you spend far more time scratching your head over nonsensical puzzles and an uninteresting plot about a dude, his girlfriend and exotic locations filled with unexotic characters like army soldiers and professors. And lemurs.

This review turned out to be more of a rant on my recent adventure game frustration, but whatever. Runaway: Dream of the Turtle is not really worth your time, unless you are a sucker for trial-and-error puzzle solving and item creation. Without the humour.

Pros

It's an adventure game. While I've decided most of them suck, it's still something, right?

Cons

Baffling item puzzles and boring story. There's little thought to overall game progression and addictive gameplay here.