Road 96 review: fun and high jinks on the campaign trail '96

The existent game is the friends y'all make along the way

A screenshot of (I think) Stan, a pair of brothers who dress in yellow overalls, orange gloves and boots, and black balaclavas, and do crimes up and down the country in Road 96

It's skillful to make words piece of work hard for y'all, the lazy piffling ingrates, and Road 96's title is grafting pretty hard. Information technology's referencing both the proper name of the road leading to the northern edge of fictional USA-alike Petria - confronting which you will fling successive drastic teenagers in a procedurally generated hitchhike-athon - and the year information technology'southward all ready. Yes, it's 1996, and everyone is sharing tapes, blithely getting lifts with strangers, and very concerned with the oil industry.

It'south also nearing the ten year anniversary of a terrorist attack at that same border, which exploded the side of a mount and killed hundreds of bystanders. In a movement that only makes sense when tidy plotting demands your 7 intertwining personal and political stories demand to come to a head all at once, the totalitarian government of Petria have decided they volition hold the upcoming election on the aforementioned 24-hour interval every bit the large anniversary event. A big pre-emptive whoopsie-putter to them.

Petria is an accented nightmare of a state for many reasons (not least that teenagers are habitually sent to a special juvenile re-education facility known every bit The Pit), but it'due south currently suffering an epidemic of "missing" teens, nigh of whom are trying to cross the border. You play every bit a succession of anonymous ones, hitchhiking, motorcar-boosting and walking towards the border from thousands of miles away. Your first-person time in each one's shoes ends when their journey does, either by failing or making it accross. You could be arrested hundreds of miles abroad, defenseless correct at the border, shot en route by an extremely capricious cab driver, or simply run out of energy and collapse on the road.

Your journeying is marked by stops along the way, possibly at a motel, or an sometime gas station, or a trailer park. Sometimes it might exist a political party for donors of incumbent President Tyrak (a knob), other times you'll wake up in the cab of the lorry that picked you up from the side of the route. And, usually, you'll run into ane of seven characters who each have a office to play in the story. My favourites were Stan and Mitch, a pair of ridiculous, vaguely Droogian thieves dressed in blackness ski-masks and yellow jumpsuits; A Clockwork Orange via lads who actually like The Joker. They're obsessed with infotainment fake-news host Sonya, and are trying to runway down the man planning to kill her. They yell, "Stan and Mitch!" a lot, because they are their ain hype men, and pronounce "scared" like "scurred" in a charmingly self-witting manner. They can't vote, and then are sort of anarchic, everyone-for-themselves types.

A screenshot of the Road 96 menu screen showing the abilities the player has accrued (like lockpicking or quick thinking) and the progress they've made with each of the supporting cast of characters

Sonya herself is pro Tyrak while being very aware that her show peddles lies and that people have very expert reasons to dislike the authorities. 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 constitute a fleck of a shame, considering she goes on a bit of a journeying of self-discovery that I won't spoil, only which I establish the to the lowest degree interesting or sympathetic. Doubtless you will have your own favourites; like online dating sites will tell y'all, there's someone for everyone in this world, peculiarly when and so much of the voice acting and writing is this fun and charismatic.

Suffice it to say, you quickly work out that person Ten is relationship Y to person Z, and the stories all form an web that you only see a few strands of at a time. The clever scrap is that they can appear in any club. If you were told the tale from outset to end, all linear and neat, then it probably wouldn't be anywhere near as captivating, and you'd spot twists a mile off. Only because you never know who you're going to run into side by side, in that location's always a picayune thrill after every load screen. "I hope," you recollect to yourself, "I get another Stan and Mitch scene next. I haven't seen them since we escaped on their motorbike by throwing greenbacks they'd stolen at the windshield of the cops in hot pursuit."

A screenshot of a neon sign for a truckstop in Road 96. It says BIG BEAR REST STOP and then TRUCKERS ONLY underneath, in orange yellow neon. — **Sea to shining sea**
Some of the little 1-acts take smashing settings, specially the ones fix at dark, which frequently make bully utilise of the low-cal. As you travel, you see the mural change, from wide deserts to colder forests every bit yous head further north to the border. But nowhere looks *prosperous* - even the parties for rich people take toilets knocked together from corrugated iron, and plastic garden furniture. Lovely stuff.

Instead you'll be greeted by the sprangling guitar music that suggests you're about to hang out with John the trucker. Sometimes the proc gen goes a flake awry (i time John dropped me off into a cabin scene that later featured him returning and leaving again), but more often than not it makes for a suspenseful little mystery, and your own playthrough will probably differ a lot from anyone else's. In that location are very smart touches, like how many characters have a unlike song associated with them, and considering you lot're playing a new teen each fourth dimension yous run into someone it's fun to leverage player knowledge, sneakily, guiltily, to help people out.

Because you're not a totally passive traveller in Route 96. Each segement has a chat or a mini-game. You might play discover-the-lady at a party with Sonya, or hack into a dorsum room with Alex. Virtually volition, eventually, give you a skill you'll need to escape over the border, or will help you lot as other teens. Stan and Mitch requite you a lockpick, for example, and you can choice these up in a dissimilar order each time besides. I got hacking from Alex actually early, and the lockpick actually late. So many doors unopened!

At that place are some dialogue choices that are clearly [any response here] that won't modify conversations, but some of your deportment 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 Dorsum Bridgades to take more vehement paths) or washing your easily of the whole thing and pissing off somewhere else.

Considering some other matter nearly Road 96 is that information technology doesn't pretend it's not political, or analogous to current or recent events. Tyrack and his party are conspicuously positioned every bit the right wing, and you lot're not asked if it's right to resist them or not, just rather how to resist. People even say "faux news". The third pick - of trying to divorce yourself from the situation - is sometimes represented as saying you take no opinion, or even staying silent, which feels like a burn. And, interestingly, sometimes doing the right thing, similar trying to save a cop from a machine crash, volition go you immediately thrown in jail. I call back information technology'south trying to be more than realistic and pragmatic, where sometimes you might expect a game to reward you with attaboy biscuits for existence good.

Not that I think information technology's a truly accurate representation of beingness homeless, since food and money is ordinarily quite easy to come past, or of political struggle, or indeed of crossing the border, because that office is pretty easy likewise. I managed information technology every time: saving money to hire a coyote, going through secret tunnels, smuggling myself in the back of a lorry. Even spending ii days climbing over a mount wasn't also tough. Tell you what, though. Fabled view. Great journey to keep.