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Road 96 review: fun and high jinks on the campaign trail ‘96The real game is the friends you make along the way
The real game is the friends you make along the way
It’s good to make words work hard for you, the lazy little ingrates, andRoad 96’s title is grafting pretty hard. It’s referencing both the name of the road leading to the northern border of fictional USA-alike Petria - against which you will fling successive desperate teenagers in a procedurally generated hitchhike-athon - and the year it’s all set. Yes, it’s 1996, and everyone is sharing tapes, blithely getting lifts with strangers, and very concerned with the oil industry.
Road 96 Does Procedural Storytelling Well | My Fav Thing In… (Road 96 Review)Watch on YouTube
Road 96 Does Procedural Storytelling Well | My Fav Thing In… (Road 96 Review)
Sonya herself is pro Tyrak while being very aware that her show peddles lies and that people have very good reasons to dislike the government. You also get to meet a conflicted cop, a trucker who’s secretly a member of the Black Brigades (the leftist protest group labelled terrorists) and a geeky kid called Alex who’s as smart as he is naive. The “main character”, if there is one, is arguably Zoe, which I found a bit of a shame, because she goes on a bit of a journey of self-discovery that I won’t spoil, but which I found the least interesting or sympathetic. Doubtless you will have your own favourites; like online dating sites will tell you, there’s someone for everyone in this world, especially when so much of the voice acting and writing is this fun and charismatic.
Sea to shining seaSome of the little one-acts have smashing settings, especially the ones set at night, which often make great use of the light. As you travel, you see the landscape change, from wide deserts to colder forests as you head further north to the border. But nowhere looksprosperous- even the parties for rich people have toilets knocked together from corrugated iron, and plastic garden furniture. Lovely stuff.
Because you’re not a totally passive traveller in Road 96. Each segement has a chat or a mini-game. You might play find-the-lady at a party with Sonya, or hack into a back room with Alex. Most will, eventually, give you a skill you’ll need to escape over the border, or will help you as other teens. Stan and Mitch give you a lockpick, for example, and you can pick these up in a different order each time too. I got hacking from Alex really early, and the lockpick really late. So many doors unopened!
There are some dialogue choices that are clearly [any response here] that won’t change conversations, but some of your actions do have consequences - managing to persuade someone to build a bomb or not, and so on. Sometimes your response will be marked with little icons. These represent moderate resistance with democracy (encouraging people to vote to get Tyrak’s opponent into power), radical resistance (encouraging the Back Bridgades to take more violent paths) or washing your hands of the whole thing and pissing off somewhere else.
Because another thing about Road 96 is that it doesn’t pretend it’s not political, or analogous to current or recent events. Tyrack and his party are clearly positioned as the right wing, and you’re not asked if it’s right to resist them or not, but ratherhowto resist. People even say “fake news”. The third option - of trying to divorce yourself from the situation - is sometimes represented as saying you have no opinion, or even staying silent, which feels like a burn. And, interestingly, sometimes doing the right thing, like trying to save a cop from a car crash, will get you immediately thrown in jail. I think it’s trying to be more realistic and pragmatic, where sometimes you might expect a game to reward you with attaboy biscuits for being good.
