What is Road 96?

A campy political narrative-driven episodic survival horror roguelike (or, as I’ve alternately heard it: “procedurally generated walking simulator with permadeath”). If that sounds insane to you, that’s because it is. In this game you play as a sea of faceless, nameless teens, each trying in succession to road-trip their way out of the country of Petria, as they flee from the iron fist of the despotic President Tyrak, who – following a terrorist attack in '86 – rose to eminent power, Drained The Swamp and Built the Wall.

There’s a lot to like about this game. Apart from its multiple endings and surprisingly good soundtrack, probably the main reason is its absurdly refreshing, genre-busting concept. In what other game do you get to say “wew, I spawned super far from the border this time so good thing I just found this bag of cashew nuts, also that artsy girl NPC’s epic quest to upload a bunch of damning evidence to wikileaks is two thirds of the way through, I still have my mind-activated food voucher from the rabid news anchor and the blue party is up +4% in the polls, we may win this yet”? In what other game do you control a sequence of political victims who go from horrified pushovers to an army of miniature Jason Bournes who can talk their way out of every situation, break any lock and hack into any computer? Also, in what other game do you find anything like the pure lunacy of trying to complete a run and cross the border in this game?

Let me paint you a picture of how this typically goes. You reach the border, and then “Let’s see here – I’ve got $47, an oxygen mask, a bag of marbles, a USB stick that can auto-hack any Windows XP machine, a hospital clown’s phone number, a pan flute and 5 energy units. Let’s do this”. You spear-dive into a water reservoir by the border checkpoint, swim underwater to the other side using your oxygen mask, float back up, and throw the marble bag by the feet of the nearest guard. He trips, which bolsters the success rate of your skill check to silently move past him from 30% to 45%. You pass this check by the skin of your teeth only to encounter 5 Humvees full of hostiles who immediately open fire at you. With a split-second reaction you parry all the bullets using the pan flute and reach the border wall, then climb the wall after bolstering your rock-bottom motivation by a strategic quick phone call to the hospital clown. But then the guard cat pounces on you. You have the tuna can, right? Wait, you don’t? Listen, the tuna can was right there inside a locker at a dilapidated motel that you passed by in map 4 out of 19 of your run. If you failed to pick it up you have no one to blame but yourself. Now your skill check to evade the guard cat has a 15% success rate, and I shouldn’t have to tell you where this is going. The cat’s screeching meows summon 17 armed guards to your location. They forcibly overpower you and throw you in a cell where your eyelids are taped wide open and you are forced to watch re-runs of Tucker Carlson Tonight for the rest of your waking life. Game over, and don’t try to pull the same stunt again with your next teen and bring the tuna can this time; the Tyrak regime has learned from this experience and dried up the reservoir.

Having waxed poetical about the good, I am also obliged to mention the bad. I won’t mince words, when I say this game is campy I mean it in the full sense of the word. Road 96 has last-century production value, and insofar I am qualified to judge the writing, I judge it as not great. The order in which you encounter scenes is random a lot of the time, which forces the 6 NPCs (who are the stars of the show) to spoonfeed you an exposition of their connections with each other repeatedly, 30 times each. More generally the storytelling in this game just has no subtlety; characters plainly shout their motivations at the top of their lungs, and act as simple caricatures more often than not. I don’t know if it was on purpose, but the game did in fact remind me of a 90s game in many ways, whether it’s the plethora of absurd mini-games (air hockey! Racing! Play ‘bella ciao’ on the trumpet! Bartending! Man the Gas pump!) or the way its mechanics remain exactly as simple no matter the effect on the audience’s willing suspension of disbelief. e.g. you can vandalize Tyrak’s posters in front of his sea of guards and supporters, with no consequences; you can be inside a locked car with a serial killer, with a gun pointed to your head, and you will have the option to unironically break the ice with “so… You’re gonna vote on September, right? We’re getting rid of Tyrak?” because that’s how the game is built, you have that option in every dialogue, serial killer or no. In fact 70% of the work in politically deposing Tyrak, should you choose that route, is done by vandalizing his posters and throwing one-off talking points at his die-hard supporters. I will carefully say that based on my own experience, politics doesn’t work like that.

The Prequel: Road 96 – Mile 0

If I am reading my Google and Wikipedia correctly, the original Road 96 was published by a small studio that, at the time, had never tasted anything resembling proper commercial success. After showing this game’s demo at an expo they were bought out for an undisclosed sum (7 studios including this one were acquired for a total of ~$300 million). The first Road 96 spread by word-of-mouth, or, to put a finer point on it, by the sheer incredulity of people digesting the fact that yes, someone had actually made the game they just played.

So, looking back, a sequel or a prequel or another quel of some sort to Road 96 was inevitable. Still, when it was announced, I could not contain my instinctive response: “Hah! Really?”. The original game was a wacky, self-contained pearl – lightning in a bottle that could only be captured by a singular stroke of genius, daring and a complete lack of self-awareness. Replicating it seemed impossible, and building upon it also seemed a tenuous proposition. In response to my skepticism the devs just shouted YOLO and showed me that if they were able to produce an entertaining roller-coaster that completely disregarded all my notions of good taste once, they could do it again, and even more emphatically this time. With two games now in the Road 96, uh, franchise, I can say one main thing to characterize it: the highs are very high and the lows are very low. One moment you’re saying “wow, they really nailed this”, and the next you’re saying “come on, seriously”.

I will stop talking around the issue. This is a game about an unlikely connection between two ostensible political enemies, peppered by intermissions that are instrumental pieces that you roller-skate / QTE through while evading obstacles and collecting rings (which doesn’t really literally happen, it’s just a metaphor) as the country around you slowly descends into a fascist dystopia. That’s right: you’re playing West Side Story meets Sonic The Hedgehog meets Nineteen Eighty Four. Two or three of these instrumental intermissions are – definitely not master strokes of art, but also definitely master strokes of something. If you don’t mind spoilers I invite you to watch The Attack in '86 which is, read this carefully, a ring-collecting obstacle course through which a broken girl works out her falsified memories of a terrorist attack at a political rally, while her friend tries to force her to confront the fact that no, it didn’t happen like that. Also Ten More Years of Tyrak which is reminiscent of the bad trip the protagonist of Catherine experiences regarding his crippling fear of commitment.

I must give the game’s climax its due credit: it is the dankest possible climax they could have written, given the game’s premise. If they had outsourced the climax to the internet and said “top comment gets to pick what happens in the game’s climax”, the top comment would be the exact thing that happens, in the exact way that it happens. What other games can lay claim to that particular distinction? It’s a very short list – I would say maybe SOMA and Untitled Goose Game. Also I must give credit to the game’s lapses into amazing displays of self-awareness, such as an over-the-top newspaper delivery mini-game where everything and everyone reacts accordingly to the fact that you just threw a newspaper at them; and, also, everything to do with Tyrak’s son Colton, whose swing you are honored to push in what is a truly transformative experience.

As for areas where the game could have been better, one major point is that the marketing says “your every choice matters” and that’s… not technically a lie, but the closest something can be to a lie without crossing the line. This claim was clearly made to appeal to the sort of people who nagged the devs to add the ‘Stay loyal to the Dark Lord’ ending in Tyranny. Actually in the Road 96 Prequel your every choice affects one of 2 karma meters, which in turn modify maybe a total of 4 lines of dialogue and force your hand in 2 major decisions, each of which modify 10 more lines of dialogue (and, granted, decide whether 2 supporting cast members survive or not). Also, the game’s opening sequence is a narrative train wreck. It tries to say “and then, following that monumental loss, an unlikely friend appeared, who comforted Kaito in his time of sorrow”, which is well and good, but to communicate this, this friend appears out of nowhere inside of a psychedelic dream sequence while loudly playing the trumpet as Kaito repeatedly moans “ow, stop it, ow”. That’s, excuse my French, too clever by half.

So anyway if you want to roller-skate your way through a deranged crowd of political fanatics shouting “ten more years! ten more years!” then let’s face it, you don’t have an alternative. After this they’re going to make a deckbuilder horror FPS about the political rise of Tyrak, and a Puzzle Racing Visual Novel about Tyrak’s replacement rebuilding NATO; and who am I kidding, I’m going to pay for those, too. So here’s to 10 more years of Road 96 madness. It’s happening, and it’s my fault. I’m sorry.