Runaway 2: Dream of the Turtle (Nintendo DS) Review

Bringing over PC adventure outings to the DS is something that many thought would start earlier in the system's life, but now it has finally become the new trend and two of the most recent examples show exactly how things should be done (Secret Files: Tunguska and Last King of Africa, the reworked version of Paradise), how more effort could be put into certain translations (Ankh: Cursed of the Scarab King) and exactly why a straight port definitely does not always work out for the best due to the tiny DS screens, when compared to a large PC monitor (as was the case with the painfully butchered port of Syberia II). The reason why Runaway 2: Dream of the Turtle received so much attention when first unveiled was because it boasted almost all of the 7GB PC original would make the transition to the tiny DS media card, along with all of the game's full motion video, thanks to a special codec Nintendo had supplied the developer with. And, pleasingly, in the visual stakes this was no empty promise as whilst players are working their way through the story of Brian Basco's search for his attractive friend Gina (which also sees him stumbling across a dangerous secret and plenty of tricky situations) they are treated to numerous extremely well-detailed video sequences that help to further the story and add to the general atmosphere.

Now, the only real downside is sadly quite a major one - there is no voice work. Even though the sound effects and background soundtrack are definitely quite easy on the ears, the closest you get to any voice work is the odd grunt in cut-scenes. Thankfully the mixture of puzzles on offer work very well indeed, keeping gamers more than occupied throughout and engaging the brain on many an occasion, somewhat compensating for the vast abyss caused by the lack of speech. Although some puzzle games will either rely on rather obscure solutions to puzzles that leave players frustrated or others force the triggering of what sometimes seem like extremely finicky actions before progress can be made, Runaway strikes quite a happy balance on both counts. Should you want to incapacitate a pesky monkey that blocks your path in as humane a way as possible, by making it drink from your bottle of whisky, for instance, and then watching as it falls into a deep slumber, this can only happen once the first logical approach of distracting it with your wind-up toy dog is attempted first. Only after the first attempt has failed can the more unusual tactic be employed. Similarly, you have will not be able to attach your magnifying glass to a long pole and use it on a ray of sunlight to burn other objects until there is a specific reason to do so. The game tries its best to negate the frustrations of randomness found in some point-and-click adventures and pulls it off quite well on most occasions.

Another positive aspect of Runaway is how it tackles the issue of the DS screens being considerably smaller, obviously, than the average PC monitor. Whereas Ankh: Cursed of the Scarab King often reduced players to mere randomly tapping on the touch-screen in the hope of either finding the solution or even actually finding anything that could be interacted with, Runaway employs an interesting 'zoom-in' technique where if the stylus is held down on the lower screen, a small zoomed-in area appears and players can continue to drag the stylus around to investigate a location in a much more thorough and productive fashion. Tapping the D-Pad changes the cursor from 'Look' to the interactivity tool and items can be highlighted in the inventory menu and either combined with each other or used with various aspects of your surroundings. Everything works surprisingly well, but unfortunately there is a somewhat 'unfinished' feel to the whole package, with the menu slightly rough around the edges, the touch-screen being slightly unresponsive in some instances, and the previously mentioned lack of voice work leaving awkward silences whilst players are forced to sit and read lots of text. Focus Home Interactive has already confirmed the third Runaway game, 'A Twist of Fate', will be heading to DS, so hopefully any niggles found here will be ironed out. In the meantime, though, this is a pretty cheap option for adventure fans and provides an entertaining and moderately absorbing ride that is certainly miles better than Syberia II's port, much more fun than Ankh, but cannot quite improve upon Secret Files.