Road 96 is an adventure game, very much inspired by the TellTale style. While the game earns merit for trying to do something unique with its story telling by putting you in the shoes of several runaways and it offers a lot of variety in what you’ll do on your adventures, the events and how they unfold are so unbelievable and comical (whether on purpose or not) that it took me out of the experience. For a game with a seemingly serious political message, it’s a strange design choice that doesn’t really gel for me.
In Road 96, you take on the role of several different teen runaways who are hitchhiking to cross the border into another country because their current one has become a totalitarian government where the police are crooked and everything is corrupt. The game is really reaching to try and make a statement about how there are good and bad people on all sides of the political spectrum, which is respectable… until you realize how zany this world and the characters who live in it truly are.
The best thing about Road 96 is the sheer variety of different things you get to do in the game. While on the road, you will run into all kinds of strange people who will request your assistance. While the majority of the game is conversational, you’ll find yourself robbing places, shooting nail guns, playing soccer, hacking transmitters, swerving around traffic and much more. I wouldn’t expect this much variety in this style of game, so the game definitely earns points for that.
It’s a double edge sword though because it makes a lot of the world unbelievable and silly. And that’s the main problem with the game. It wants you to take its political message seriously (I think?) while the rest of the game is completely silly. The tone is just all over the place.
For instance, you have two guys who wear bright jumpsuits and masks who go around robbing places and people, some times in broad daylight. They repeatedly shout their names together like a couple of numbskulls and always try to include these runaway kids in their crimes. So many questions come to mind! How do people not notice these guys from 20 miles away? How are they not in jail? They bumble every robbery, so who takes them seriously? Why do they try to get kids involved with their shenanigans? Why does one of them sound like a big, dumb, Looney Tunes character? It’s all very perplexing.
The game features a full roster of these characters and it’s truly a love ‘em or hate ‘em situation. You have the robbers, a serial killer, a cop, a trucker, a smart whiz kid, a red haired girl with ties to the government and a tv show host (I think that’s all of them?). You will run in to them randomly through your travels as you will play with 6 or 7 different teenagers to complete the game and each character seems to have several story points where you get to interact with them while the game tells its main narrative at the same time. I thought this approach was very unique and fun.
However, the fact that all of these strangers would trust someone they don’t know, who is also a teenager/kid, to do some of the things they request them to do is just kind of bonkers. Or even some of the super personal things these people will tell some teenage kid off the street is just crazy to me.
And after these encounters, which at times, can be pretty dark, there is this hilarity where you, you know, instead of running for your life down the road or into the wilderness form this event, you whistle and stick your thumb out to hitch hike. I laughed out loud several times when I did this.
Some of these characters you run into are pretty insufferable and I got to a point with a couple where when I would happen to come to one of their story points, I would roll my eyes thinking “Ugh, not this again…”
As I mentioned earlier, the game is mostly conversational. This becomes a big problem as a lot of the voice acting is not great. I know it’s an indie game, but jeeze, some line delivery in this game is just awful. But it must be hard to deliver some of these lines as the dialog isn’t great either. It’s passable but most of the time I feel like they’re either going for a joke that doesn’t hit or it’s “campy” funny, in that, I don’t think they intended it to be funny (or did they?)
Considering all of that, the graphics make the game look like a TellTale game was released on the N64. I’m exaggerating a bit but wow. Normally this doesn’t bother me but on XBOX Series X, I was kind of stunned by how bad it looked at times, how dark the game was in certain spots and how the models on the road (like billboards and trees) seemingly grow out of the ground as they appear.
The game gets points for being unique in certain ways but I just wish the execution was a bit better. It’s a decent game, it’s playable without many bugs and at times, I enjoyed the unique situations but it’s just unbelievable and too campy for me to take it seriously. I also wish this just looked a bit better on Series X.
In Road 96, you take on the role of several different teen runaways who are hitchhiking to cross the border into another country because their current one has become a totalitarian government where the police are crooked and everything is corrupt. The game is really reaching to try and make a statement about how there are good and bad people on all sides of the political spectrum, which is respectable… until you realize how zany this world and the characters who live in it truly are.
The best thing about Road 96 is the sheer variety of different things you get to do in the game. While on the road, you will run into all kinds of strange people who will request your assistance. While the majority of the game is conversational, you’ll find yourself robbing places, shooting nail guns, playing soccer, hacking transmitters, swerving around traffic and much more. I wouldn’t expect this much variety in this style of game, so the game definitely earns points for that.
It’s a double edge sword though because it makes a lot of the world unbelievable and silly. And that’s the main problem with the game. It wants you to take its political message seriously (I think?) while the rest of the game is completely silly. The tone is just all over the place.
For instance, you have two guys who wear bright jumpsuits and masks who go around robbing places and people, some times in broad daylight. They repeatedly shout their names together like a couple of numbskulls and always try to include these runaway kids in their crimes. So many questions come to mind! How do people not notice these guys from 20 miles away? How are they not in jail? They bumble every robbery, so who takes them seriously? Why do they try to get kids involved with their shenanigans? Why does one of them sound like a big, dumb, Looney Tunes character? It’s all very perplexing.
The game features a full roster of these characters and it’s truly a love ‘em or hate ‘em situation. You have the robbers, a serial killer, a cop, a trucker, a smart whiz kid, a red haired girl with ties to the government and a tv show host (I think that’s all of them?). You will run in to them randomly through your travels as you will play with 6 or 7 different teenagers to complete the game and each character seems to have several story points where you get to interact with them while the game tells its main narrative at the same time. I thought this approach was very unique and fun.
However, the fact that all of these strangers would trust someone they don’t know, who is also a teenager/kid, to do some of the things they request them to do is just kind of bonkers. Or even some of the super personal things these people will tell some teenage kid off the street is just crazy to me.
And after these encounters, which at times, can be pretty dark, there is this hilarity where you, you know, instead of running for your life down the road or into the wilderness form this event, you whistle and stick your thumb out to hitch hike. I laughed out loud several times when I did this.
Some of these characters you run into are pretty insufferable and I got to a point with a couple where when I would happen to come to one of their story points, I would roll my eyes thinking “Ugh, not this again…”
As I mentioned earlier, the game is mostly conversational. This becomes a big problem as a lot of the voice acting is not great. I know it’s an indie game, but jeeze, some line delivery in this game is just awful. But it must be hard to deliver some of these lines as the dialog isn’t great either. It’s passable but most of the time I feel like they’re either going for a joke that doesn’t hit or it’s “campy” funny, in that, I don’t think they intended it to be funny (or did they?)
Considering all of that, the graphics make the game look like a TellTale game was released on the N64. I’m exaggerating a bit but wow. Normally this doesn’t bother me but on XBOX Series X, I was kind of stunned by how bad it looked at times, how dark the game was in certain spots and how the models on the road (like billboards and trees) seemingly grow out of the ground as they appear.
The game gets points for being unique in certain ways but I just wish the execution was a bit better. It’s a decent game, it’s playable without many bugs and at times, I enjoyed the unique situations but it’s just unbelievable and too campy for me to take it seriously. I also wish this just looked a bit better on Series X.