Official details for Runaway: The Dream of the Turtle

PC adventure game fans will immediately recognize this oddly-named title from a few years back. What you might not know, however, is that European developer Pendulo Studios has been hard at work on a handheld version of the classic PC game. The amount of work that has gone into getting this fully-animated adventure to run on the DS hardware is a story in itself: the developers have innovated new compression technology to cram almost a half hour of animated cutscenes onto the cartridge. Without giving too much of the (quite creative) story away for folks who haven’t played the game, the plot centers on an attractive young couple named Brian and Gina who are thrust into an international puzzle-solving adventure after their plane crashes during vacation on a tropical island. For players of the classic Lucasarts SCUMM games, the controls should be immediately simple to pick up. Most actions in the game require simply ‘clicking’ on an appropriate object or person to initiate an action. Thanks to some innovative technology developed by the wizards at Pendulo, the game actually features TWICE the resolution of a standard DS game, to allow players to zoom in and investigate objects more closely. All of the additions on the DS version sound excellent, so we can’t wait to revisit this island when the game ships in Spring 2008.

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