Rainbow High: Runway Rush Review

As a father of two girls, the various doll/show hybrids get incredibly confusing. Ever After High, Mermaze Mermaidz, LOLs, all of the Barbie shows – they blur into one. To me, at least, they are all clones of each other, designed to bemuse parents like myself. But it’s always been this way. I remember Bratz.

Which means that I’m sat here, playing Rainbow High: Runway Rush with barely any idea of what is going on. So keep that in mind when it comes to the verdict. Part of the problem is that my daughters gave up on Rainbow High: Runway Rush almost immediately (a hint of what’s to come). I can’t rely on them to be my tour guide through all of this. 

Okay, here’s my attempt. 

Rainbow High: Runway Rush takes place entirely in Rainbow High itself. It’s term-time at the High, and the span of the game takes you through some assignments and culminates in a group project. If you’re tired of school yourself, you might want a second thought about playing Rainbow High: Runway Rush: it’s not exactly escapism.

One of Rainbow High: Runway Rush’s trump cards is that you don’t have to play just one of the girls. Six of them are playable from the start, and you can switch between them whenever you fancy. For fans who have a specific favourite, this is a dream come true. You can be Ruby, Poppy, Sunny, Jade, Skyler or Violet for 80% of the game, tapping RB to become a specific student when a minigame demands it.

That’s because each of the girls has a specialism, which – my girls reliably tell me – is true to the show. Poppy is the DJ, and she handles the rhythm action minigames. Ruby is the mixed media fan, and her photographs take the form of clay pigeon shooting. Yep, you heard that right. Someone chucks items across the screen and you have to ‘shoot’ them when they cross the reticule in the middle of the screen.

The minigames each represent an art task, abstracting them into something fun that doesn’t quite feel like work. And we are happy to say that they are all fine. They don’t do much that’s new – there’s a sewing minigame where you have to keep a stitch from flowing out of a line, and a coding-style game where you get a sun to its rainbow goal – but they don’t really need to be anything innovative. They’re fun intermissions for each quest.

They’re not the problem in Rainbow High: Runway Rush. It’s everything else that’s not up to snuff. You don’t have to believe us – you just have to ask our kids.

As mentioned, the entirety of Rainbow High: Runway Rush takes place in the grounds of Rainbow High. You don’t even get to see sunlight: presumably this is set during lockdown, as you’re a shut-in for the whole game. 

Now, that would be fine if Rainbow High was a joyful place to be. But it’s about as full of personality as the Overlook Hotel in The Shining. Each of the many, many rooms are handed a class number and look identical, which gives the impression of being in a prison. Most of these can’t be opened, but they look like the rooms that can be entered. So, now we have the beginnings of a maze where you’re looking for class needles in a school haystack. Which one of these many doors contains the Reception where you can get a form you need? You may never find out, as you’re haunting the corridors of Rainbow High forevermore.

King Minas wouldn’t have built such a heinous maze. Instead of a Minotaur, you’re being watched by dead-eyed clones. In all seriousness though, it creates a fatal problem for Rainbow High: Runway Rush. It gives you destinations, but those destinations all look the same, and the corridors and atriums often look like each other too. Ignoring how lifeless that makes the game feel, it creates a navigation problem for younger players. Our two girls simply couldn’t make head nor tail of the game, and we struggled at times too.

There is a map, but that map is so hidden that we only found it at the end of the game. But it doesn’t help: it’s covered in icons rather than text, and the icons aren’t hugely representative. A quest tracker on-screen tells you where to go, but is frustratingly inconsistent about the degree of detail. Would it have hurt to have a breadcrumb trail? Instead, you’re resorting to memorising where classes are, and some of those are near-identical to each other, so it’s easy to get your wires crossed.

We’re not sure if we’ve played a game where simple navigation was the arrow that killed it. But when the players are as young as our family (four and eight, if you’re interested) then it’s a sizeable enough problem to kill the whole game dead. They simply didn’t know where they were meant to go, and didn’t have the patience to persist. How on earth did this not get solved at user testing?

Not that our kids were missing all that much. It’s at this point that I take over and effectively complete the review. Now, clearly, Rainbow High: Runway Rush is not made for me: everyone is hopelessly positive about each other and passionate about following their dreams and being the best artists that they can be. It’s a self-affirming game for budding fashionistas, and that’s as far away from me as possible. 

My query is why the stakes had to be so low and the quests so dreary. We weren’t joking about getting a form from reception: that is genuinely one of the missions in Rainbow High: Runway Rush, and it doesn’t get much more outlandish than that. We found ourselves gathering fabric, getting access to studios for other students, and generally being either an admin or student. 

We’re probably taking umbrage with the show more than the game when we say that the world of Rainbow High is drab too. Every man in the game has the same broccoli-topped haircut, and virtually every woman has long hair and the same copy-pasted eyes. Each studio is laid out in much the same way, and we’d struggle to name a single landmark outside of a tree, a cafe and a statue of a deer. There’s even an area that’s a crossroads, and seems designed to turn you about.

Not that you have much chance to get bored, because Rainbow High: Runway Rush suddenly stops at about the three hour mark. This isn’t a long game, nor does it do much in the way of culminating with a flourish. There’s a show that you need to work towards, but that show is very suddenly a problem, and is dealt with without much bother. The credits roll and – if you’re like us – you wonder whether that was it. We expected to, you know, actually leave and go to other locations, but no. Rainbow High is where we will stay, forever and ever and ever.

There are precious few side-quests, and Rainbow High: Runway Rush has an odd love of four-digit codes that can be found around the school and typed into lockers. We won’t question why we’re raiding our friends’ lockers for coins to be spent on clothes. We think the Rainbow High girls have a problem that they should see a specialist about. But ultimately these activities are not enough to keep playing, so we put Rainbow High: Runway Rush down, wondering what we had just played.

As wish-fulfilment for fans who just want to be their favourite fashion students, Rainbow High: Runway Rush just about gets a pass. It’s generous in handing you each of the girls to play, whenever you want to play with them. They can be dressed up and they’re all true to their TV show form.

But those are the only compliments we’re dishing out to Rainbow High: Runway Rush. What remains is a series of fetch quests in a joyless maze. We found ourselves lost in identical crossroads, searching for Studio 2 (it was in class #93, obvs). Our mascara was running and our brain frazzling. We’ve talked to our kids, and apparently that is not what the show is about.