Since its announcement during The Game Awards last year, Road 96 has intrigued fans of unique indie games with its approach to a road trip adventure. Developer Digixart's new game tasks players with trying to escape the collapsing nation of Petria in the summer of 1996, taking them on a procedurally-generated journey that involves driving, walking and hitchhiking to survive. Along the way, players will meet NPCs with their own intertwining stories and make crucial choices that can help them change the world -- or bring their journey to a premature end.
Reviews are in for Road 96 alongside the game's launch, and critics generally seem to be enjoying the game. While many do note certain visual and mechanical issues, most of those who have played the game note that its storytelling and characters provide a compelling and enjoyable gameplay experience.
Tristan Ogilvie, IGN: "Petria is a nation divided, and thus the people you meet sit on varying points on the political spectrum...It's not all life-or-death, but certainly some care has to be taken to keep certain characters onside and also propagate your own political beliefs, both of which shape Road 96's eventual outcome. Alleviating any anxiety brought on by constant decision making are a healthy variety of fun side activities at each stop along the roadside, whether it's bartending and petrol-pumping mini-games to earn extra money, or assisting a policewoman with an investigation by interviewing motel guests and eliminating suspects based on their responses, like a game of Guess Who? Some of these diversions are pretty far-fetched -- like when I had to beta test a homebrew video game on a laptop while driving a stolen car -- but no less entertaining or memorable."
Zoey Handley, Destructoid: "Your journey is broken up into segments. In each area you find yourself in, you make the choice of how you want to proceed, whether you hitchhike, walk, bus, steal a car, or take a taxi. Your choice is factored into what scene you find yourself in next, but it seems partially random. You're dropped into a character's scene and play it out...
The characters are what make Road 96. The dialogue and animation falter every so often, but it's hard to not find something interesting in the characters. They all have their own ideals, often affected by things in their past. Some are outlandish, some are creepy, and they all present something different. Yet none of them I found irredeemably abrasive...I wouldn't want to be friends with some of them, but I wasn't disappointed when one would turn up, either."
Jennifer Burch, Nintendo Wire: "DigixArt has advertised Road 96 to have 148,268 route combinations...but you need to understand that these combinations will be repetitive. As for why, it's due to this procedural road trip adventure being tied to a narrative story. Playing as faceless teens, we (the player) will always be an outsider to the main story. Our actions just shift the main characters concerning their relationships and where they will (or won't be) on September 9th, 1996.
Some characters' journeys are fairly straightforward...The only influence you have in those cases is what characters will say to one another (and even then, it might not be as drastically different as you'd want it to be)...Even with discovering all abilities and all events (but not all the outcomes) for each major character and throwing myself again and again at Petria's wall (which was via 22 escaping teens across three playthroughs), I can't help but boot up Road 96 again."
Jon Bailes, NME: "So much of Road 96 is pregnant with the possibility that things could go either way, and it's a testament to the deployment of its smoke and mirrors that I exited many scenes unsure if I could have forced an alternate outcome. There's thus a rhythm of breathless improvisation throughout -- helped along with a bespoke soundtrack for each character -- with the only downtime coming from the natural breaks between encounters, before you're thrown right back into something."
Alice Bell, RockPaperShotgun: "Suffice it to say, you quickly work out that person X is relationship Y to person Z, and the stories all form a web that you only see a few strands of at a time. The clever bit is that they can appear in any order. If you were told the tale from start to finish, all linear and neat, then it probably wouldn't be anywhere near as captivating, and you'd spot twists a mile off. But because you never know who you're going to run into next, there's always a little thrill after every load screen."
Christopher Byrd, The Washington Post: "Though I found most of the plot points and the dialogue to be serviceable at best, I found the overall construction of Road 96 to be promising. Constructing a game with branching narrative choices around a series of road trips is a fantastic concept that I'd like to see done better than it is here because it offers a great deal of creative flexibility. The manner in which Road 96 cuts from scene to scene and regularly introduces new mini-games keeps things fresh despite its lackluster story arc. The analogy that came to mind as I made my way through it was of watching a B-movie made by a director of obvious talents. I couldn't help but think how each scene could have been made better with more refinement."