If there`s a true winner to emerge from Runaway 2: Dream of the Turtle, it`s Spanish-bred Pendulo Studios` art department. Whether you love or loathe the cast, the acting, the scripting, or the gameplay, Dream of the Turtle pens the most breathtaking animated 2-D graphics this side of the early Broken Sword adventures.

By "adventure," know that you`re circling a field of point-and-click gaming that enjoyed its heyday back when Reaganomics was the official buzzword, Will Wright was breaking ground with his very first Sim City, and the closest thing video games had to "3-D" was moving a vaguely human stack of sprites from the foreground to the background of a King`s Quest sidescroller.

Instead of defaulting towards a "they don`t make `em like they used to" argument, I recommend soaking in Dream of the Turtle`s plush settings, where every inch of breezy tropical flora, wavering undersea spelunking, and cotton-candy snowfall scenes are as lovingly-crafted (in a Western style) as Okami is (in an Eastern tradition). I recommend getting to know a handful of the cast from Dream of the Turtle, whose characters brandish themselves -- in turns -- as sheepish, surefooted, adolescently sexy, dull-witted, and (once in a lucky while) dryly comedic. Even when a character puts on a stereotypical coat, they always manage to cultivate some greater depth, either through sheer dialogue, or through extensive posturing.

There`s the ox-brained army grunt … that happens to be an ex-logger who relaxes by climbing trees, and ends up being one of Runaway 2`s most likeable and genuinely funny supporting roles. Then there`s the scantily-clad Hawaiian hottie … that happens to be jaded over men`s Pavlovian sexual instincts, but still gives a loving recitation of ex-boyfriends` names, countries of origin, and occupational tendencies. Even the American Eagle cover boy, Brian Basco, is still just the awkward, occasionally whip-smart college geek from the previous Runaway title. Brian, the series` two-time protagonist, even runs into a meditative islander with a prosthetic leg and a tendency to crossover into metaphysical planes of existence by, um, taking copious naps. There`s just enough honesty -- and just enough hyperbole -- to make the cast of characters memorable, for better or worse. One character makes a series comeback as a chalkboard-writing monk observing a vow of silence (you`ll have to play the game to find out which parts of that last sentence are true or false).

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What rings consistently false, however, is the fuzzy logic required to piece together the A + B = C inventory puzzles. When you have to fill a urinating toy dog with brandy in order to get a piss-licking monkey drunk to leave you alone long enough to put a coating of anti-slippage spray onto an algae-covered rock in order to climb up to a cliffside road-to-nowhere that ended in a 10-foot drop into a pool of mud anyway (huff huff) … Well, when you dig into this convoluted pile of non-sequiturs in order to advance the chapter, gameplay doesn`t equate to anything more than grasping at straws by clicking on every unimaginable combination of actions and item combos you can think of. You`re not trying to get into you...