Hidden Runaway

Hidden object games have to tread a careful line between fulfilling the promise of their genre and letting discoveries flow at a decent enough pace to keep you interested.

Hide things too well and you'll end up with a screen-jabbing yawn-arama, but stick them out in the open and you're just left with an object game. Which doesn't sound like much fun.

Hidden Runaways errs a little too close to the obscure, often leaving you poking around the screen in the vain hope that something appears. It's a shame, because the new ideas the game brings to the genre elsewhere often make for an entertaining experience.

The game is based on a series of popular point-and-click adventures from the early part of the 21st century, and features protagonists Brian and Gina re-telling their first adventure as a series of hidden object puzzles.

It makes for an interesting narrative drive, but also raises the question of why, when you're being chased by mafia hitmen, you'd bother trying to find a bunch of weird gewgaws once you've discovered your car keys were stuck up a tree.

Odd pacing points aside, the game's hidden objects are sometimes too well-hidden, only discovered by jabbing wildly at the screen or using the game's hint system.

Those hints have a cooldown time, and you'll often find that when there are only a couple of items left to discover you'll have to twiddle your thumbs while the game recharges the power.

There are non-hidden object interludes, most of which are far more entertaining than digging around the cluttered screens. It's in these sections that the game comes to life, whether you're rearranging the pieces of a torn receipt or trying to put musical notation in the right order to save the life of a pianist.

Everything about Hidden Runaway is polished, from the animations to the art style. It's just a shame that the heart of the game is so underwhelming. Hidden Runaway remains a curio for fans of the series, and an entertaining but flawed experience for the rest of us.