Runaway: A Twist of Fate

My first thought booting this up was that Pendulo Studios clearly studied everything that made Runaway 2 a slog and built a correction list. The result is the best entry in the trilogy by a reasonable margin, which is a genuine surprise given how bumpy that road was getting. You play as both Brian Basco and Gina Timmins across a story that opens at Brian's funeral - a genuinely gutsy cold open that hooks you before the first puzzle loads. Brian has apparently faked his own death after being convicted of murder and committed to the Happy Dale Sanatorium, and the game spends a good chunk of its runtime inside those walls, letting you wrangle patients including a contortionist mime who hands you imaginary inventory items to solve actual puzzles. That single sequence shows Pendulo at their creative peak. The two biggest quality-of-life upgrades over the earlier games are the hotspot display button, which highlights every interactive object on screen, and a built-in animated hint guide accessible without leaving the game. If you've ever rage-quit an old-school adventure because you spent forty minutes clicking on beige wall textures, these additions matter enormously. The puzzles are mostly inventory-based - find items, combine them, use them on characters or objects in the environment - and the logic is more grounded here than in predecessors that occasionally felt like they were written by someone who had never met a human being. Some late-game puzzles still demand cartoon leaps of reasoning, but they're the exception rather than the rule this time. Visually, Pendulo's pre-rendered 2D style on an updated engine looks genuinely lovely in places. Locations range from a sprawling New York cemetery to a mountain cottage to grimy city streets, and the animated cutscenes have a handcrafted quality that holds up well. The character art leans hard into exaggeration - lantern jaws, cocked eyebrows, goofy supporting cast members who look like cartoon celebrities - and it fits the tone. The voice cast was rerecorded for this entry, which is a sticking point for series veterans who bonded with the previous actors. Brian's new voice in particular loses some of the nerdy awkwardness that made the character work, and Gina's performance is uneven. The English translation from Spanish is solid overall, though occasional audio bugs surface where characters sound like they're shouting from inside a tunnel. The honest caveat is runtime. You're looking at six to ten hours depending on how often you consult the hint system, and there is no replay incentive once the credits roll. The story also requires at minimum familiarity with the first game to land its emotional beats properly - Runaway 2 is skippable, but the original is worth your time first. For point-and-click fans who have been around long enough to remember when this genre dominated PC gaming, A Twist of Fate delivers a warm, funny, occasionally frustrating send-off that earns its Very Positive Steam rating without pretending to be something it isn't.

Alex · Scout Team

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