Road 96 offers classic Covid-escapism: the chance to carve a riotous, unique road-movie in a brilliantly conceived fictional country beset by a populist authoritarian leader.
Since the advent of Covid, videogames have acquired a previously unseen function: as virtual holiday destinations. Road 96, a clever procedurally generated game from French indie developer Digixart – run by Yoan Fanise, who was a prime mover on Assassin’s Creed and Valiant Hearts before striking out from Ubisoft – takes game-tourism into seductive territory by aiming to let you construct your very own, unique road movie.
We’re all in need of escapism right now, and Road 96 delivers plenty of that. Its premise is intriguing. Set in the fictional country of Petria in 1996, in the build-up to the tenth anniversary of a “terrorist” attack that saw a bomb kill many people at the mountain that marks Petria’s northern border, it proves to be something of a reflection on populism and authoritarianism.
That’s because Petria is governed by the brutal Tyrak, who has spent the last decade strengthening his tyrannical grip on the country. As a result, the main option open to Petria’s oppressed youth is to figure out how to get over the border and escape to freedom. In order to play Road 96, you will assume the personae of a steady stream of teenagers, shepherding them to the border (the eponymous Road 96) and once there, working out how to get across without being shot or arrested.
Road 96 takes place over a specific time-frame, spanning the couple of months before the aforementioned memorial to the bombing, which also coincides with a general election – Tyrak has a political opponent, although no Petrians have any faith in the democratic process, and the Black Brigades, blamed for the bomb, are preparing more drastic action. Your actions – you will get seven runs with different teens per play-through – will determine what happens on that fateful day.
All sorts of unpredictable shenanigans await during the course of each such mini-quest. Road 96’s general underlying gameplay vibe is reminiscent of Telltale’s point-and-click adventures of yore, as you meet and interact with an ever-growing cast of Petrian inhabitants – several core characters have storylines which fully unfold over the course of an entire play-through, again with your actions having a say in their fate.
Those characters include a sympathetic cop, a party-loving right-wing state TV presenter, a pair of gimp-suited bank-robbers, a 14-year-old hacker helping the Black Brigades and many more. Your involvement with them (and other lesser characters) varies wildly – sleuthing and puzzle-solving are often involved, or you might find yourself pumping gas, assisting with a bank-job, mollifying a psychotic taxi-driver, playing gambling games with someone else’s money or even ingesting dubious substances in Petria’s only limo and playing a trippy rhythm-action game.
As you get to know the key characters, you acquire useful skills from them, including hacking and lock-picking, and with each teen you play, when you get to the border, you then must work out the best way of getting across. One determining factor in that is your health, which can be replenished by eating, drinking and sleeping; acquiring a decent stash of money along the way helps, too.
The overall effect is very much the intended one: of starring in your road-movie, rendered even more chaotic, random and memorable by the procedural generation, which also generates a vast amount of replay value. In a second play-through, even when you encounter sequences which you’ve played before (and you will find plenty of new ones), you can play them completely differently.
It’s possible to play Road 96 with sympathy towards the Black Brigades and a view to toppling Tyrak – which feels intuitive, given the run-down, neglected and oppressed state of Petria. But potentially, even more fun can be had by suppressing any liberal tendencies you might possess and shopping any Black Brigade operatives you encounter to the authorities. Road 96 certainly makes a hugely apposite point about the dangers of sleepwalking into populism. But it does so in such a politically agnostic manner that you could envisage it developing cult status among the extreme right (even though it gently parodies those with such beliefs).
If there’s one aspect of Road 96 which isn’t entirely up to scratch, you would point at its graphics, which are cartoonish and low-poly. But its overall art direction, despite that, is impressive: through your peregrinations, you will develop a love for Petria’s virtual geography.
But the game’s real triumph lies in the characters you meet, who generally also seem cartoonish at the outset, but reveal nuance as they open up to you. Road 96, then, ends up being the unplanned open-road-hitching holiday that we can all dream of, in the firm knowledge that there’s no way we’d be able to enact it in the time of Covid. It may be a blocky-looking indie game, but it’s quite unlike anything else out there, and possesses an originality and character which is utterly unique.
