Bow Street Runner. Such a good name for a game, I thought. But wait, Bow Street Runners were actually the first professional police force in London. That being said, you take the role of a new Runner recruited by John Fielding, Henry Fielding’s brother who is the founder of Bow Street Runners. It’s an episodic adventure game spread through 5 episodes and claims to be historically correct which means that you learn something new while playing games! That’s always a good thing. First episode starts with a murder of a man lying dead in Covent Garden so you’re sent to investigate.

At the first glance I enjoyed the game’s professional use of different technology. Although it’s a Flash game, it’s elements include live action characters composited onto a 3d background much like in the old adventure games such as Phantasmagoria. It’s really nice to see such style so many years later with today’s technology and yes, it looks damn good. Much like in Phoenix Wright series (more on that later) you click your way through hot spots until you find certain clues which either raise your Esteem level, trigger other events or simply let you go to the next place. Leaving a scene means that you’ve done everything in it and that you don’t have to come back. That makes things a lot easier and it’s a system I personally prefer. Certain hot spots will trigger mini games in which you have to click and drag your mouse through a given shape, much like in Trauma Center or Dark Cut. It’s also one of the hardest and sadly most annoying parts of the game. Not only you have to be really precise, but the given time is brutally short so these mini games become near impossible towards the end of the game. There are of course other types of mini games too. By failing in some mini games, you don’t get the Esteem which you need to rank up. I haven’t found any other point of the Esteem bar except that it gives replay value to the game since you lose chances of building the bar further and thus not getting ranked up. In a certain mini game, failure changes the course of the storyline a bit which is always a good plus and makes you wonder what happens if you succeed.

It’s safe to say that the game is influenced by Phoenix Wright on the DS but done in a realistic way. Especially since you have to gather evidence and correctly present it to John Fielding at the end like in the court. I personally haven’t succeeded so instead of getting a game over, I got an alternate ending. In my second playthrough I encountered a couple of bugs which actually didn’t let me finish the game. Still, it’s a really amazingly done game from Channel 4 and is definitely worth playing.

- Luka M.,
C404.net

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