The Run review

• Reviews by Richard Hoover
• Published:

With no puzzles breaking the momentum, this compelling FMV thriller races along at a breakneck pace

It was supposed to be a walk in the park. Or, more accurately, a run in the wilderness. However, when social media darling Zanna Hendricks takes a jog through the nature trails of Northern Italy, she gets more than she bargained for. Stalked by four masked killers, she must make crucial, desperate decisions if she’s to survive her circuit and return to the safety of the town. This is The Run, by PRM Games, the latest FMV choose-your-own-adventure-style interactive movie following in the vein of director Paul Raschid’s earlier The Complex, The Gallery, and Hello Stranger. While expectedly light on gameplay, Zanna’s plight, a chilling tale of morality and redemption, and sweeping camera views through gorgeous vistas ensure a captivating experience for the short time it lasts.

As the game opens, Zanna awakens in a little cottage in the European town of Libitina – a place whose namesake was the Roman goddess of funerals, burials, and corpses. She’s unsure how it is she’s come to be in this place and has a rather awkward start to her day when she’s reacquainted with her one-night stand hook-up, Matteo. Hastily extricating herself from the situation, Zanna gets on with her job as a vlogger who livestreams runs in different locations around the world to her more than five million followers. This day, she decides to try the nature trail outside of town.

Festooned in a bright pink spandex jogging suit, Zanna heads into the countryside. As she leaves the quaint town behind, she takes in the majesty of the forest it’s nestled in. Dense trees and foliage abound. Craggy cliffs provide stunning views… And then a masked assailant grazes her with a crossbow bolt from behind. Suddenly the forest has become home to not just one of these silent terrors, but four, and they all have it in for Zanna and any other unlucky souls they come across. Poor cell phone service prevents Zanna from calling for help. And with the masked menaces chasing her from behind, she can’t simply retreat. All she can do is run the entire forest trail loop and hope to make it back safely. Along the way, she must try to stay alive by hiding wherever she can along the path, and when desperate even resorting to fighting her pursuers mano a mano at key junctures with whatever makeshift weapons she can find.

Gameplay consists of choosing between pairs of options presented on-screen at key points in the story. By default these choices are timed, but the settings allow you to pause the action for more time to ponder a decision if you wish. I went with the timed mode, which can sometimes be tricky in this type of game if they barely provide enough time to even read the options let alone consider what should be chosen. Here, however, the time allotment to make a considered selection is generous enough. 

The majority of decisions in The Run fall into two categories, both of which are crucially important in their own way. Some deal with Zanna as a person and how she treats others she encounters in her travels, like an old shop keep in the town before she sets out, a creepy family out in the forest, and even her attackers. When reception allows, she also gets sporadic phone calls such as from her social media manager, who wants her to have an online video chat with a hospital-ridden child who admires Zanna. Is Zanna helpful? Selfish? Suspicious? Kind? Such choices influence her ultimate fate and that of the others she meets. 

Other decisions are more of the in-the-moment, life-and-death variety. Most of these come down to a coin flip as to what to choose. Should Zanna go left or right when fleeing an assailant? Should she attack high or low? There isn’t really anything in the story to suggest one option over the other in these cases, or even what, exactly, a choice might entail if you choose it at times. And there are very definitely good and bad choices here. It comes down to dumb luck, and my luck was particularly dumb as I managed to choose the wrong option in almost every case. Such choices result in Zanna dying, revealing one of the game’s twenty unique death scenes (collect them all!) of varying degrees of gruesomeness, though all in the PG-13 range. Strangulation, nail to the head, your typical psycho killer finishing moves. After one of these scenes plays, the game resets back to the moments immediately before the choice was made, so you don’t have to rewatch a lot of video before picking the other option. This is a necessity, as the game does not allow you to make your own saves, providing instead a single progressive autosave every time you move from one scene to another.

The Run

Genre:	Thriller
Presentation:	Full motion video
Theme:	Psychological
Perspective:	Third-Person
Graphic Style:	Live action
Gameplay:	Interactive movie, Survival, Choices matter
Control:	Point-and-click
Game Length:	Short (1-5 hours)
Difficulty:	Low

Zanna is not entirely alone in her run through the forest. Midway through the story, she encounters Matteo again, who is helping on his family farm. After learning what’s happened, Matteo insists on teaming up with Zanna and going to search for his grandmother, who left earlier for her own exercise in the forest. Along the way, Zanna and Matteo have the opportunity to bond and reveal aspects of their pasts that they’d ordinarily keep hidden, providing a nice bit of emotional resonance on top of simply running for their lives. 

The acting is quite good throughout, with Roxanne McKee as Zanna and George Blagden as Matteo the two standouts. Ms. McKee does a good job of portraying a woman fleeing in fear but resolved to survive this ordeal. Mr. Blagden is also convincing as a man who’s lost his faith in himself and questions the decisions he makes. 

Visually the game is a treat, taking good advantage of its full-motion video presentation. Sweeping aerial shots showcase the rural landscape nicely. Action scenes keep things moving and are well choreographed. These typically occur when Zanna and Matteo are forced to confront the four killers. Such sequences are punctuated by pounding synth music that ratchets up the stress further.

While the game certainly has its horror elements – a spooky trip through an abandoned fort immediately comes to mind – The Run never gets outright scary. While the masks the killers wear are certainly unnerving, the effect of being pursued by homicidal maniacs is a little diminished as the story takes place entirely during the day, so there’s no psycho thriller lunging out of the darkness of night. I also found the randomness of dying by making a “bad” decision I couldn’t have foreseen took some of the edge off. Since most of the life-and-death choices provide no hint as to what the right option is, the arbitrariness makes the game less suspenseful.

Despite that, the tale overall is enthralling. Interspersed throughout Zanna’s flight for her life are flashbacks to when she was a child in a cross-country race with others from her school. These moments are laced with foreboding and it quickly becomes apparent that something ominous happened in Zanna’s past. Matteo too, has elements of his own history that he’s not proud of. All of this comes to a head in a final showdown at the game’s climax, delivering a satisfying and emotional conclusion to Zanna’s run. If you can survive to the end, you’ll discover who these masked attackers are and why they’re out hunting the environs surrounding this sleepy little village. 

Once the story concludes and the credits have run, the game presents a screen of final stats. Here you can see how many of the 234 available scenes you’ve found. My own first playthrough only totaled 71, so there was quite a bit still left to explore. The stat screen also tracks how many of the five possible endings you’ve reached, the number of decisions you’ve made, and which of the twenty death scenes you stumbled into. 

All of this is listed above a map of Libitina and the forest surrounding it. Trail paths with small thumbnail images are shown on the map, providing a visual illustration of the lines taken through the game. There’s something of a missed opportunity here, though, as you can’t click on these scenes to begin replaying from these points. However, as an initial playthrough clocks in at a modest hour and a half, it’s not that demanding to start a new one to try different choices. The replay process can be sped up even further, as you can hit the Tab key to skip any scenes you’ve already watched. Your choices do have a definite impact on the ending and even on some of the events you encounter throughout, making at least a second go a worthwhile endeavour.

Final Verdict

You’ll certainly speed through the experience with no real gameplay slowing you down, but it's more than just a compelling survival tale. The live-action presentation is highly immersive and the game’s killers provide a tense creep factor without going full-on slasher flick frightening. While the instant do-or-die decisions could provide more clues as to what the right option is, it’s in the choices about who Zanna is as a person that the game finds its most meaningful moments, culminating in a heartfelt outcome that is both surprising and satisfying. It’s not much of a gaming workout, but The Run is at times poignant, at times metaphorical, and at times an experience sure to get the blood pumping.

Richard played The Run on PC using a review code provided by the game's publisher.