The Run: Review - Another FMV game, but is it any good?

The Run is yet another FMV game (developed in Unity) - I know, I know, I keep not being impressed by most FMV games, but I keep giving them a chance. Deep inside me is a secret hope that one day, we will get a FMV game that will be genuinely amazing. And honestly, as a kid living in the 90s, we got pretty close at some point. The CD-ROM multimedia (lol already cringy at the time) revolution brought FMV games front and center, and while the video codecs and playback capabilities were fairly poor, this was the era of awesome games like Wing Commander III that felt like a movie, Under a Killing Moon that turned pixel-art adventure games into something cinematic and exciting, and of course Star Wars: Rebel Assault that gave you a chance to experience Star Wars in first person. All of them have aged badly, but they were amazing at release. Not only because they looked better than older 2D or 3D games - but they did try to make games into a more serious medium, uplifting the narration and giving some meaningful choices to players.

So are we getting something worth our while with The Run? I’m afraid I have to quote Games of Thrones here:

Not Today.

I’m actually not bringing the Game of Thrones reference out of the blue for no reason: turns out the protagonist of the The Run is Roxanne McKee, who was playing a secondary role in GOT - the one of Doreah, a servant of Daenerys Targaryen earlier in the series, as you can see in the picture below.

So Roxane McKee may not a A grade talent from Hollywood, but far from being a nobody either. Good sign.

Background

You are playing Zanna Hendricks (interpreted by Roxanne McKee, I hope you are following). Zanna is a world-famous fitness influencer, and as part of a new milestone in her number of followers, she has come to a remote running trail in the picturesque mountains of Northern Italy. The first scene is a little awkward: Zanna wakes up in someone else’s bed and she realizes she had a one night stand with some random dude living in the area. After a few words, the guy leaves for work, and Zanna gets ready to go back on the trail.

As you progress on the trail, you will encounter skull masked people who are killing villagers and end up chasing you as well. Those guys are serious, don’t want to talk, and have enough guns and blades to get things done.

Who are they? Why are they on a killing spree? And why are they after you?

Interactive?

So you are given the chance to make binary decisions now and then, at some point in different scenes. The default is for them to be timed, so you can’t think forever. You can change the options to pause the action instead in the menu.

Some choices are not really obvious - “go north”, “go south” and the like. There is some branching, so you have a couple of different paths you can follow in the story. Some decisions only matter immediately (leading to your death or your survival, for example) and once again it’s never too obvious what should be the right choice. I don’t really like that, because it means your choices are going to be mostly somewhat random and not motivated by any hint you may have seen before. The decisions end up mattering at the very end (I won’t tell you why, no spoilers), but at least I better understand how the choices were written, retroactively.

Not that it’s necessarily a good thing.

Bad Writing

The production is decent. It’s very clearly filmed by a team who knows how to handle camera work. It’s not amazing, but it feels at about the same level as what you would typically find on an average TV show. There is fairly extensive use of drone imagery - sometimes it feels too much (throwing drone videos where it was not needed).

Actors are OK. It’s not like they were given a lot of back story to work with, so they do a decent job all things considered. The soundtrack and music is not worth talking about - it exists, it does what it needs to do, and that’s it.

There are several action scenes (where you have to make quick choices) and those are not great. You will die a lot until you find the right answer for those, and it frankly does not make any sense. Despite all the propaganda, very few women can wrestle down a man bigger than themselves, and certainly not win by pure strength. I guess this is OK when Marvel does it because they can use the super powers excuse, but in real life this would be pure fiction. But I’m willing to disregard that entirely, I know what they were going for.

It’s the writing that torpedoes all this work. I must admit, I am always flabbergasted that people are willing to put so much money on the table to produce something, and yet not focus first on the fundamentals. You’ll see when you reach the end of the game and the credits that this project must have cost a little fortune to produce. There are at least 4 or 5 dozen actors, stunt doubles, a large production team, etc… I would not be surprised if this game has cost more than a few million dollars to produce end-to-end.

So the guys who worked on this game went to hire actors, scout locations, fly in with a ton of equipment, but could not be bothered to sit down in comfortable chairs with a coffee cup, review the script and improve on it, which is the cheapest thing you can ever do. Yet that activity that costs virtually nothing is the one that’s going to have the biggest impact on the finished product. That’s the main reason why the first seasons of GOT were extraordinary (following fairly closely GRR Martin’s books) and the later ones completely fell apart once Dumb and Dumber bros could not for their life write a proper season by themselves. GRR, for all his merits ended up completely dropping the ball on the series, focus on secondary prequels, sub-stories and novellas instead of finishing what everyone expected from him. Probably the second-biggest fraud in the history of television after Lost. But I digress.

Writing is everything. No amount of camera work and acting is going to save a story written by a five years old. I think I need to elaborate a bit. So you are a woman chased by killer skull-masked guys, and you manage to kill one of them. Note that in this scene, you have now all the time in the world, and nobody is looking for you. I don’t know, my first reaction would be the remove the mask of the fucker who tried to kill me and find out who he is - search his pockets, etc. Or you know, take his weapon so that you can defend yourself in case someone else tries to get to you. Somehow, what feels like the first thing anyone with 2 brain cells would ever do is beyond the imagination of the protagonists, whose next steps is just to go back on the trail. That is just lazy, bad writing, right there. Never mind that when you find dead villagers on the way, suddenly the same protagonist decides to film everything with her smartphone. Makes no sense.

So if a FMV game costs several million dollars to produce, it needs to sell more than a few hundred thousand units to break-even, more or less. I am guessing that there must be a large enough audience out there on Steam and other platforms, since FMV games keep being produced year after year. The business model appears to work. But they are too limited in scope and can’t really go much more mainstream as is.

Going mainstream with the current model is not easy. FMV games are usually too short, and The Run is one of the worst offenders here. I finished the game in a little more than a hour, which felt incredibly limited. There’s apparently 3 hours of content in total if you do all the scenes, so there’s a bunch that I did not see in one “run”, but at the same time there’s no easy way to revisit your past choices. You have to start the game again from scratch, and there is no way to skip scenes. No thank you!

FMV games need to go to the next level. This means:

• They need to be longer. To feel like a TV Show. At least something like 10 hours of gameplay.
• They need decent video production, but that’s already something they deliver. So it can be done. But it may have to become cheaper.
• well-crafted, well-written stories are necessary. We are so far from there right now. And such stories need to work well with interactive elements (i.e. valid choices)

We’ve never been closer, but I don’t see much progress either way in the past few years. The FMV games keep being pumped out but there’s barely any improvement in the depth of the format. Good writers are hired to work on other projects, apparently. If anything, Visual Novels have clearly shown how this can be done in a slightly different format. FMV have not had their Danganronpa moment yet.

Will they ever?

The Run is available on Steam, and we were provided a review key by the publisher.