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Runaway: Dream of the Turtle DS

Format:
DS

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Despite the fact that most of the television adverts seem to be positioning the Nintendo DS as an adult hand-held console many of the games are aimed at the child or casual gamer. Having struggled to find something that might require a few brain cells to play I was intrigued by Runaway: The Dream of the Turtle. This point-and-click adventure stems from a critically acclaimed PC game series. With that kind of pedigree I figured it was worth a look.

You play the game in the guise of Brian Basco, a trendy looking science whiz who is searching for his girlfriend Gina after their plane crashes on an Hawaiian island. As with traditional point-and-click adventures you have to solve puzzles and talk to the locals to try and solve the mystery and find Gina.

I'm not sure I have the right kind of mind-set for this game, while I was happy enough searching the crash site for strange items to pick up and put in my bag, a bottle of whiskey, a plastic puppy, a stick and some goggles; actually using the items to solve the puzzle was a little more tricky. Whoever would have known that by filling up the tank on the puppy with whiskey you could capture a pesky lemur who was trying to foil your escape? Took me a good half an hour to figure that one out!

When I finally managed to evade the lemur and figure out how to cross the ropey looking swing bridge I successfully completed the first chapter and was rewarded with a pretty impressive cut away sequence. I was quite surprised that the graphics could be so good on such a small screen. Of course as is usually the case the actual gaming screens aren't quite as good as the cutaways. It's here that I think the game suffers a little from the limiting aspect of the console. Whereas on a PC developers can take advantage of a high resolution graphics card and a variety of controls, on the DS you're pretty much limited by the low-res small screen and the stylus. I found that if I didn't have the lighting just right I struggled to make out the detail on the screen, and when you're expected to uncover all manner of strange items you really need to be able to see them!

I think point-and-click fans who are willing to forgive the clunky graphics will enjoy this game. As for me? I don't think I have the brain power or the patience to finish it I'm afraid. I became more and more frustrated by the fact that the ‘puzzles' have to be solved in the right order, a cupboard that appeared to be empty suddenly contained some anti-slip spray only after I'd tried to climb a slippery rock. In fact I'll share a little guilty secret with you here, in order to complete the first level I had to look up a cheat's guide on the Internet!

Written by Clare Sharpe

You can support Clare by buying Runaway: Dream of the Turtle



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Clare Sharpe writes the Eclectic Gamer column.

"I think it's probably true that most of us have grown up with computer games - I have a dark and distant memory of some sort of black box with two controllers that allowed us to play an extremely primitive and pixelated game of tennis."

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