The sun-bleached highway stretches out before you, you grow tired walking in the sun's oppressive heat, but with every step the mountains on the horizon grow closer. You're driven by a purpose, a desire for a better life, somewhere beyond the confines the oppressive country you were unfortunate enough to be born in. Road 96 beckons, a road trip full of peril and adventure awaits. At a leisurely pace, of course, this is a walking simulator after all!
Road 96 is an interesting project. On the one hand there is nothing mechanically complicated about it. You walk, you interact, there are occasional “action” segments where you shoot a nail gun that has unlimited ammunition. There’s not a lot going on here for your thumbs. What it does offer is an intertwining cast of characters who revolve around and collide with one another as well as an overarching plot that binds them all together.
Spoiler alert, from here on out, though I won’t delve too deeply into things since Road 96 really is something that you ought to experience for yourself. The game claims to be procedurally generated which I suspect is only half true, the vignettes where you run in to characters seems set but the order in which you encounter them is unique. I also suspect that the vignettes of individual characters develop in a linear fashion as well, though the choices you make can alter those developments and they do seem to have actual impact upon the world and the plot. Trust me, go into this one with as little plot knowledge as possible.
The way I wound through the plot resulted in a revolution that toppled the fascist government, though at the expense of people’s lives there is a brighter future for Petria on my Xbox. Your results may vary, of course, which makes this a unique game to discuss among other players. I made some choices, you’ll make some choices, how different were the outcomes? What ending did you get? Did this character die? Did that character build the bomb? Did that other one get arrested? It’s cool that, as far as games with story choices go, this one seems to have variability and doesn’t just result in one of two hardly different outcomes.
Without getting into full on spoilers, there’s not much else to say. Playing as these nameless teenagers trying to escape from a country that’s failed them, looking for a life beyond the wall built to keep foreigners out that doubles as a prison keeping them in, following a vague promise of a better life, you come to sympathise and understand the lengths that people will go to. You may not like every character on the road, you may choose to help one and not the other (I will never help a cop no matter how much a game pulls at my heart strings, I ain’t no snitch!) but there are threads of humanity buried beneath their cartoonish fronts.
Road 96 isn’t all self-serious, it’s funny and heartfelt, it has a strong message about borders and how they keep people divided, about political polarization. Oh, and like all good road trips, it has some bangin’ tunes to pop into the cassette player. Pack a bag, flex your hitch hiking thumb, and make sure you don’t miss out on this wonderful little gem.
