Escaping a corrupt government is a concept few game studios ever really touch upon in a meaningful way. Road 96 attempts to take players on a journey packed with adventure, emotion, and love through a dangerous and sometimes heart-pounding set of scenarios. Developed by DigixArt, this experience is dripping with so much emotion that it's hard to talk about anything else and stands out as a game that will capture the hearts of countless players.

Story

You are a teen…You are escaping your country of Petria and attempting to hitchhike your way to the border where you will finally grasp your freedom. This is all the context you are exposed to when first starting Road 96. Initially, it's confusing but intriguing, when starting the game and experiencing the story I had absolutely no clue why I was this teen, why I was escaping Petria, and why I should care at all about this journey. 

All these questions were answered upon my first death. In Road 96 you can either reach your destination, get arrested along the way, or die trying. Unfortunately for my character I died relatively quickly upon my first journey and was immediately sent to the game's start menu. After choosing another teen and restarting my journey again with a new scenario, it all clicked and I was given just enough context as to why this was happening and why it mattered. By the end of each journey, I began to care more and more about these characters and more importantly, the experience as a whole. 

One of the most engaging elements of Road 96’s story delivery is in the form of a select number of key NPCs that you will encounter multiple times throughout your journeys as different teens. These characters have a massive role to play in the overall unfolding narrative and will remember your past characters, occasionally bringing them up in conversation. These encounters are all seamlessly organic and can be triggered in a huge variety of ways, making each time you see them all the more special and unique. Uncovering these characters' stories and pasts is just as satisfying as understanding the overall narrative, making each journey with a teen worthwhile and gives the player new stories to look forward to with each playthrough.

Gameplay

Exploring and talking; this pretty much sums up the majority of the gameplay within Road 96, and this is by no means a bad thing. In your attempts to escape to Petria’s border, you will have to hitchhike. This means that you have a number of ways to travel including, hitching a ride, walking some distances yourself, or calling a taxi and paying for a lift. Each of these encounters usually takes place in an environment or level that involves some kind of interesting scenario. These scenarios involve talking to NPCs and generally helping or contributing to a problem where you will need to make a moral decision or potentially progress a main NPC’s story. 

The great thing about these scenarios is that they occasionally involve a mini-game or puzzle directly relating to what you're doing. Two of my absolute favorite scenarios include helping a pair of criminals who break into a building and the other, finding info on someone. When it came to the robbers, you help them through the security room and try to watch their back, all while looking for clues to unlock safes and at one point defending them from a security guard trying to bust into the room. The other scenario is taking a baseball bat alongside another character and completely trashing a camp that he considers the base of the enemy. Afterward, you enjoy a rare peaceful and calm exchange, learning more about him before he moves on. These scenarios make the gameplay for me. Without them, I would really feel the inevitable repetitiveness of repeating each journey with a different teen because yes, it does get repetitive at times.

My only gripe with the gameplay presented here is that these environments given to the player are breathtakingly pretty, and have clearly had a ton of artistic love and care put into them but don’t encourage exploration. At times I wanted to wander off into the woods or over a hill and just see what else was there, only to be met with invisible walls or unpassable terrain. I fully understand this might not be the game's intention at all to let players venture that far and that they’re attempting to keep players’ focus where the action and story is but it definitely felt like a missed opportunity.

Audio and Visuals

What can I say about the visual direction that isn't immediately obvious? It's clearly beautiful and is covered with the indie charm that makes us repeatedly fall in love with the style, time and time again. Each character and environment hits the art style with pinpoint precision every time and is honestly an impressive display of an art team that fully understands the visual direction of their game. Encapsulating the visual charm of indie classics like Life Is Strange with an attitude that is unlike anything I have ever played before. 

The characters themselves are diversely designed and cover a comfortable range of new ideas and recognizable stereotypes, this keeps them interesting yet familiar. This is a trait they utilize multiple times to tug at the player's heartstrings and make cool moments into beautiful and meaningful ones. While the environments are modeled and animated quite remarkably, the characters are lacking in the realm of animation. Sometimes feeling a bit janky and occasionally, unintentionally awkward, these animations do take the suspense or heart out of particular moments where it really needed to be there.

In saying that, this is an indie game and expectations should be set before playing. Budget constraints and limited resources are very much a thing in this industry and if anything was to be cut down on, I’m glad they chose animation. The other fantastic elements hold this game up above the majority of indie games recently released and are held up to the quality of much bigger studios. 

The soundtrack here is incredible. There's not much else to say. It prefaces each journey perfectly and keeps the pace going throughout each adventure you go on. The tracks at play here are suited to the game's context of the 90s and put you right there in their shoes. I play this soundtrack regularly while I write and I highly recommend it to anyone looking for a good and pumping collection of vibes. 

Alongside the music, the sound design is incredible and hits every beat without a miss. It can make you feel lonely with its subtle ambient sounds or up the intensity factor with enemy voices coming from every direction. No complaints here, well done sound design team.

Replayability

Every journey is different, this is what makes this game so unique and special at times. The replayability value is great and will definitely make for a few interesting playthroughs. You have so many options in which way you can approach each adventure and how you handle each encounter with important characters. 

Each time you start a new journey you are presented with three pre-made teens that you can pick out of to start the adventure. These are vastly different each time and you have to choose out of a number which leaves the opportunity to play through these paths on alternate playthroughs. Each of these preset teens has different levels of energy and starts at different areas of the map, making each journey either easier or harder, and quicker or longer. Aside from all these choices, there are multiple endings to the game which I highly recommended exploring. This amount of replayability is rarely seen in games centralized around an overall plot and is a breath of fresh air within the genre.

The only setback here is that unfortunately due to the nature of starting a journey over multiple times in one playthrough, multiple playthroughs can seem to be a bit repetitive. I am not the kind of person to play through a bunch of times and I did feel this repetitiveness start to creep in towards the end of my first playthrough. But if you’re someone that does enjoy exploring every possibility, then Road 96 has a bunch of content for you. 

What It Could Have Done Better

There is little to complain about with Road 96, but unfortunately, there are few moments that would have been nice to experience without flaws, as a lot of the game holds up to that golden standard. The ending is designed to be the climax of the overarching narrative and really builds this combination of tough decision-making and intense scenarios into one incredible sequence.

For me, this ending sequence ended up falling flat and didn't really make any big impact that I particularly cared for. Take into consideration that this game has multiple endings and I only played through the game once, meaning I only experienced one ending. Potentially, the other endings are much better than the one I got but I cannot speak from a place of experience since I haven't returned to the game much since my initial playthrough.

The only other gripe would be the sometimes scripted nature of the environments and scenarios. Sometimes this works wonders for the game and really pays off in a big way but occasionally it completely restricts the player, forcing them to complete a sequence of obscure tasks just to progress to the next step. This completely takes away from the game's open-ended design philosophy and makes the player feel as if they are just being strung along this pointless little adventure, waiting for the main event to come back.

This was most apparent during my final journey where the game continued to make my character arrive at the same location with nothing to do besides calling a taxi to progress through to the final chapter. It was never communicated to me in those moments and ended up resulting in me just wandering around and arriving at the same location multiple times. 

Verdict

Overall, this game was incredible and I definitely enjoyed the majority of what was on display here. There were only a select few elements missing and they didn't negatively impact my experience to the point of discomfort or frustration. This is one of the better indie games I have played this year and I highly recommend it to anyone that's a big fan of journeys and slowly uncovering a large unwinding narrative over a full playthrough.