Runaway Express Mystery

A well-intentioned but failed effort to innovate on the casual point-and-click adventure formula.

The idea is that you are detective who finds clues to solve mysteries. Cool! Unfortunately, there is no real gameplay to it. You just keep finding new objects to add to your "solution" board, and they are always immediately added to the right place. So the mystery will just solve itself.

Worse, the classical aspects are handled poorly. Hidden-object scenes involve you using detective tools to find objects, but you just need to click with these tools all over the screen until you find the fingerprints and blood stains. Puzzles are poorly explained: I've played these games for years, and yet was stumped with what exactly I was supposed to do in some puzzles.

The graphics are good, but the voice acting is horrendous: it seems that just two actors were employed to do all the voices. Honestly, I don't blame them for doing such a poor job considering the ridiculous script. The story tries hard to be clever, but in the end is an insultingly insipid variation on the theme of "mother trying to save her children." Only this time the mother doesn't seem to care very much at all.

Skip this one.