Road 96 (2021)

So, I watched my wife playthrough Road 96 a couple years ago and I decided that I would have to give it a try as well. I started it a few days ago and only just finished my first full playthrough a couple hours ago. I have to say that I enjoyed it.

Now onto some praise and criticisms, firstly the graphics/art style is a mixed bag. I think that graphically it can be a little rough especially some of the character models, but at the same time it has a lot of charm and beauty. The setting is interesting as it is very similar to the American West but seems to have some Soviet like politics (don't look at it to hard). The gameplay was also enjoyable and is a mix of minigames and dialogue options. However, the characters and the way that you encounter said characters is where the game really shines. The good strongly outweighs any shortcomings. My playthrough and my wife's are really different and I plan to enjoy some New Game+ as well.

PS

The music is also really fun. Definitely recommend giving it a try especially if you want a casual but unique experience.

Road 96 is a "procedurally generated" storytelling game that places you as various teenagers that are trying to escape from the country of a cruel tyrant. You hitchhike north in each run of the game, running into zany personalities of different people that help you (or hinder you) on your grand escape. Though Road 96 has some interesting offerings, it ultimately feels more like a bunch of quirky cutscenes that are individually enjoyable with little interesting connective tissue in between.

First, let's talk about these scenes. While hitchhiking out of the country, you'll run into one of the game's characters (or multiple), who will either help you or ask for a hand with a task. It could be anything from making a trucker a special coffee as he drives to helping an assassin dispose of a body discretely in a hotel. By and far, these scenes are the core of the game. The characters are all hilarious or otherwise interesting to engage with - no matter the scene, there's a lot of entertainment in hearing about each character's ploys, especially when they involve other characters.

Now, the game tells you that these routes are "procedurally generated". What this really means is that it has a system for picking out what scene you see next. In short, on each route, it'll give you a random scene with a random character. Given the mode of transport along your route, it'll try to pick a scene for a character that you haven't already seen, so you'll receive all new content for much of the game. So, these routes aren't really what I'd called procedurally generated; they're moreso just randomized, but whatever.

During the different playthroughs, there's different perks you can acquire over time that mostly are there for flavor or for small bonuses (not needing to use stamina for a task, for instance). For the most part, these don't open any particularly new paths that will give you new choices or whatnot.

Besides the light gameplay, Road 96 has an alright graphical presentation that is something that probably could have been run on a Wii, though maybe that's part of the point. The game also has a surprisingly pleasant soundtrack, and you can collect cassette tapes from run to run that will let you play the songs at will too.

The part where Road 96 begins to really break down is its overarching story and narrative. You see, the game is largely about the upcoming election against the country's authoritarian leader, who years ago, was suspected of being responsible for an incident that killed many people that he blamed on a terrorist faction. The faction is still alive and attempting to violently overthrow him, whereas others support a more peaceful movement to elect another candidate, and yet more others who support the authoritarian president, and yet yet others who are apathetic.

The biggest problem with the game is that it is absolutely terrified of having any political message beyond "killing people is bad", to the point where the game has nothing really to say. It really doesn't make any interesting statements about its world or about any topic that could even possibly have any nuance or thought provoking components to it.

The game also has three endings to it, contingent on your teenage runs ending well or poorly, and whether or not public sentiment is in favor of authoritarians, apathy, or the more liberal candidate. The real issue is that the way you influence this are throwaway dialogue choices with other characters. Dialogue choices that affect sentiment consist have the appropriate symbol next to them, and you just pick whatever option has the ending you want to get. That's it. That's all it takes to shift public sentiment. There are rarely choices that affect gameplay that result in a change in sentiment beyond donating money to a political campaign. It's a massively wasted opportunity and made me feel all the more apathetic to the game's overall narrative.

Ultimately, it's not easy to recommend Road 96 as anything more than a bunch of silly scenes connected together with some throwaway time. Road 96's efforts to be inoffensive are simply incompatible for a game that wants to conjure a tale of political revolution - all talk but no walk. Not to mention there isn't much going on in terms of gameplay, either. However, the game's characters are very fun, the one redeeming factor that Road 96 has going for it. If that can carry the game for you, you may enjoy this game, but almost all of the rest of the game is hardly worth an afterthought.

This was a pretty interesting, original take on the narrative adventure trope, creating a genre-bending style you don’t often see. The goal in heavily Firewatch-stylised Road 96 is to escape a dictatorial regime by reaching, and surviving, a heavily guarded border wall (a bit on the nose, yes). Throughout each run you're in charge of a randomly generated teenager and come across recurring characters that get weaved into the main story in a mostly logical, meaningful way. Though reaching and crossing the border is normally an easy affair, that isn't always guaranteed, which brings out a roguelike system to its structure that is easy to appreciate when everything clicks. It isn't perfect, but Road 96’s procedural generation system truly shines on a first playthrough, making you feel invested in the story and how it develops, especially because you feel you're shaping it to a degree. However, even though the game's concept is intriguing in a vacuum, the problem is that it’s also a bit too politically and philosophically obvious in its narrative, which is sometimes hard to ignore and makes it devolve into something with overly simplistic tones and little to no analytical nuance.

Still, there’s quite a bit here to enjoy. Some characters really do grow on you and your ultimate goal steeps into you mind the more you play it, simply because you become more and more familiar with the underlying background of world and people. Additionally, the mini-games within Road 96 are all awesome. They absolutely nailed the feel of every one of them, and from Pwong to air hockey they’re all worth trying. On the downside, the game starts showing its cracks as far as procedurally generated content goes on a second playthrough, both in terms of replayability and consistency. On top of that, I experienced a really annoying bug in the final third, this weird, echoey audio glitch that did not go away no matter what I did (though I couldn’t find much on it online, so this may have been a freak occurrence).

On the whole, either on a sale of via a subscription service, Road 96 is likely worth your time. It will certainly depend on what you want out of your games and your tolerance to stomach a couple of issues, but I personally had quite a bit of fun with it and didn’t feel bored once throughout my first playthrough. 7.5/10

I was pleasantly surprised with this game. The storytelling is one of a kind I haven't seen before. The character development of the 7 characters was really good. I don't know how random the procedurally generated events really are but I think telling a coherent and immersive story with such a system is very impressive.

Being very short, I felt the game lacked depth and was a bit underwhelming. I hope there will be a follow up to this game, not necessarily in the same setting, that builds on this and makes it more rich and sophisticated.

I had not heard of this game until it popped up on gamepass. I’m glad i click on the icon cause I very much enjoyed this game.

It won’t be for everyone as it is a walking sun kind of game. Very much story driven. But I feel they add several mini games to help break up the walking.

From arcade games like tank battles to air hockey and kicking a ball, to driving and dodging cars left and right. It’s all very simple but it’s the right amount of simple for such a story driven game.

The graphics are fine but could be a turn off for some as it’s that cell shaded cartoon kinda vibe. Some scenes are really pretty to me tho. From sitting by the waterfall to some night sky moments and even just driving along.

The real joy is meeting and interacting with the characters along the journey. I’m not totally sure I loved everyone. The Zoe character kind of bugged me and some times I felt what I wanted to answer wasn’t an option. But loved all the creepy moments with Jarod.

I really loved the fact I could totally miss things if i just kept going. Finding secret rooms was great. Little puzzles to get some snacks or cash always felt rewarding to me.

I loved that you could die or get arrested and that the game would just keep going until you had enough characters reach the goal.

Voice cast was solid overall but I think it has a very Saturday morning cartoon vibe to it for some reason which I could see folks hating.

My biggest issue was at the very end as one character I had died but that character talked in the final cut scene and talked about stop that clearly happened post death. Also a certain character never (in my play) talked about their child dying. I wonder if that is an option I missed or just something they left out? I kept waiting for that moment to happen but it never did.

The music is great. I love the option to collect tapes over the course of the game. You can buy, steal or be given tapes and any time there is a tape player you can pop one in. I’d probably put this under life is strange but it still has some of the beta music in a game I’ve played. It felt right and just gelled.

Overall I had a blast playing this. Beat it pretty quickly, played in episodic chunks over the week.

Overall, I loved this game. The story was emotionally immersive and I grew to appreciate if not love all the complex characters I met along my adventures (including the ones I disliked at first). The original soundtrack and graphics of the game are both gorgeous. There was a very good balance in the game between friendly characters you could easily bond with and enjoy versus disturbed characters you had to stay on your toes and say the right things with (and many who fluctuated somewhere betwixt at different points in the game). In a similar vein of balance, I really enjoyed the simple mini games sprinkled throughout that cut through all the heavy choices and constant dialogue.

There are just some technical flaws. The biggest one is that the toggle to make choices is the same to move the screen so it’s very easy to get disoriented and click the wrong choice, doubly so if the other character is moving at all. There are also choices that aren’t clearly shown as choices and just look like ways to interact with objects but if you do one, you cannot do the other which is frustrating because it’s not consistent.

Another smaller criticism is that I think there’s a lot of cutscenes that didn’t need to be cutscenes, none of them are long enough to be annoying or obtrusive, but it’s just disappointing to have missed so many opportunities for playable scenes and it makes some moments feel less like accomplishments than they could. Maybe that’s just my bias of loving the game and wanting to play more of it though.