PC Demo Roundup – Mr Robot and Runaway 2

This week I’ve mostly been playing World of Warcraft PC demos. Okay yes, one of them was a trial for World of Warcraft. Which I then bought 2 days later and have been playing ever since. But back to the point… this week I played the demos of PC games Mr Robot and Runaway 2: The Dream of The Turtle.

Mr Robot

Mr Robot is a homegrown independent game by Sheffield-based Moonpod. It’s a quirky little puzzler set on a spaceship. The script is engaging, the graphics are nice and the puzzles are reasonable. There’s enough of a story lurking in the background to make you want to play a little further. You want to find out what’s really happening around poor lowly Asimov. Plus, you get to push crates onto annoying zappy robots.

I’ll review the full game soon. In the meantime you can download the 25MB demo or watch the trailer with overly dramatic music.

Runaway 2: The Dream of The Turtle

Runaway 2 is the story of Brian and Gina (who has an extremely sexy surname ;) ). It’s a point-and-click adventure game in the traditional style that we all know and love. The graphics are lovely and the scripting is self-referentially amusing. Unfortunately, the demo is marred by that fear of all adventure gamers – there aren’t enough clues to avoid the dreaded try-combining-everything-with-everything-else technique that plagues this genre.

I have to scare away a polar bear. I’ve tried all my actions. I’ve tried everything I’m holding. I’ve tried to pick up everything I can see. I’ve tried every dialogue option with every character I’ve found.

Nothing.

I can only assume that there’s some room I haven’t entered or some object that I haven’t yet noticed. It all boils down to the old pixel-hot-spot-hunting problem. There so much stuff in the screen that I don’t know what’s usable and what’s decorative. A button to highlight useful objects and exits would go a long way. As it is, I’m stuck in the cold watching this damn polar bear and I just don’t care any more.

Try it yourself. Let me know how you did it. You can get the 440MB demo on the official Runaway 2 site. BTW, the voice-acting is very American. You Have Been Warned.