Indulge me for a moment will you. I have…a lot of thoughts and feelings about how I found myself playing Road 96 and what it means more generally to me.
It’s almost 2 years ago and I’m deep in the middle of constantly binging The Midnight’s Heroes’ album; the vignettes that each of the songs recount hitting an emotional chord I’d been ignoring for a while. But then out of the blue comes a new single from them called Land Locked Heart, ostensibly from a new game called Road 96: Mile 0. So I look up the game and it seems like it’d be right up my alley and, even better, it seemed to have a lot of big name synthwave artists on the tracks. However, whilst it was billed as a prequel to the original game Road 96 I’d never gotten around to playing it.
That put it on the backburner, the game I’d get to when I had time for it which is code for never. But for whatever reason it kept crossing my path and eventually it found its way onto Gamepass. I figured I didn’t have much to lose at that point, only potentially wasting the time I’d be wasting on other games anyway. Still there was this voice in my head, something that had been churning away ever since I wrote my Game of the Year post for 2024 that made me worry about the journey I was about to embark on.
I just wasn’t finding any narratives compelling. None of them.
That, my friends, is a pretty good sign of depression. I haven’t spoken much about my struggles with mental illness over the years, only briefly touching on it in a couple posts, but depression is something that I’ve battled with ever since my teenage years. Over time it’s changed the forms it likes to take with me, usually after I’ve developed a good set of tools and coping mechanisms to deal with it when it rears its ugly head. So, it seems, sometimes it likes to mix things up a bit and manifest in a more insidious way that I don’t realise until well after the fact. Reading back through my reviews for 2024 I saw the pattern rather clearly and so, looking at Road 96, I was worried that I was just going to repeat it.
I’m glad to say that wasn’t the case at all.
Road 96 is a procedurally generated road trip story, one that puts you in control of a runaway teenager making it for the border to break free from the oppressive regime they find themselves a part of. With barely any money and little idea of how to get there, let alone cross the border, you rely on the kindness of strangers to hitchhike with, provide you food and shelter and, hopefully guide you on your journey. This all takes place in the fictional world of Petria back in 1996 although you’d be forgiven thinking it was America, save for the tyrannical dictatorship that’s enslaved it (turns out they just got the decade wrong there…huh).
Each of the teenager’s journeys will see you run through a different set of story vignettes. The who, where and what of each of these will be random for each playthrough, meaning that no two playthroughs will be the same. There are, however, narrative elements that are fixed in order to give the overarching story some structure, something which I’m deeply thankful for. There isn’t any interaction between scenes though so if you say, meet one character that’s interacting with another that you then meet later there won’t be any additional dialogue or anything like that. So, in the end, it’s more like the story will never be revealed to you in the same way as it was to others, but it will be the same story in the end.
Each of the sections has its various objectives, some as simple as finding a place to sleep or just talking to people, whilst others have a range of full mini-games for you to play. Again these are wide and varied with success usually netting you some cash, food or other items which might be useful in that particular scene. Over the course of the playthrough you’ll also unlock additional abilities which are essentially just things to make that particular run a bit easier. They’re not necessary to get to your end objective but will help you craft the narrative in a particular direction, should you choose.
I initially thought the game made it rather easy to get to the border, that was until I fucked around and found out on several occasions that the game will take the kid gloves off very quickly. This is part of the experience though as the overarching narrative isn’t about your particular teen, it’s about the oppression that has led to a non-trivial amount of the country’s young people to try and leave it. So those couple runs where I died and the others where I got arrested? All true to the narrative and not a failure of mine to make the right choices. I made choices like a dumb teen would and the world punished me for it.
As you’ve probably guessed by now I really enjoyed the narrative of Road 96, both for its crafted narrative and the meta one I generated in my playthrough. All of the main characters are fully realised, given more than enough time to build out their backstory in a believable fashion without relying on extended exposition. The influence you have on the story isn’t particularly huge, the main beats still coming no matter what choices you make, however you do have control over the flavour of it. It’s the same kind of control I remember Kentucky Route 0 having: you can’t change the direction the ride is going, but you can change the music.
SPOILERS BELOW
I chose the democratic “vote” path for basically everything and the ending aligned to what I was expecting for the most part. There were a few choices that made that ending feel bittersweet though, with Alex building the bomb, Fanny killing John and Zoe dying at the end. Reading through the ending guides it seems those events are all interlinked though, so that one time I failed a scene which led to Alex building the bomb is what turned it for me. Still though I’m not upset with how it ended, far from it, as the various experiences I had along the way weren’t trivialised by the ending, something which far too many games fall victim to.
SPOILERS OVER
You’d think then that I’d be kicking myself for not having played this when it came out all those years ago. Indeed 2021 that was another one of those graveyard years, one where I was left scratching my head as to what to call my GOTY. Whilst it certainly would’ve helped me then Road 96 did a lot more for me now. It reminded me that I do enjoy these narrative based games and the reason I didn’t last year was something I wasn’t aware I was experiencing at the time. Now I have a much more renewed sense of purpose when it comes to these reviews, to cast off even more of the rules I set for myself so long ago.
Road 96 then is much more to me than just the experience it gave me. It was the guiding hand I needed to reflect on what’s come before me and where I want these reviews to go.
Rating: 9.0/10
Road 96 is available on PC, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S and Nintendo Switch right now for $29.96. Game was played on the PC with a total of 7.5 hours playtime and 66% of the achievements unlocked. Game is also available on Xbox Gamepass.
