Road 96

There's a moment early in Road 96 where the game asks the player why they watch movies. Is it to laugh, cry, solve a mystery or even escape reality? This is something I spent a lot of time pondering while playing through this brilliant new adventure game from French developer DigixArt. Much like movies, I play games for a wide variety of reasons, including all the options I just named. However, the more I thought about it, I realized that there is an obvious answer -- more than anything else, I play games to feel something and to have a unique experience that I've never seen before. That's the perfect way to describe Road 96, which is why this politically-charged road trip is one of the best games of 2021.

Road 96 takes us back to an especially tumultuous moment in time for the fictional country of Petria. With an authoritarian leader in office and the media stoking discontent with never-ending stories about missing children and a protest group known as The Black Brigade, many fear that the country's extreme polarization could lead to violence on election day. That's just one of the reasons why so many teenagers are running away in hopes of being one of the few who is able to find refuge by sneaking past the militarized wall and entering the neighboring country.

The setup makes it sound like Road 96 is a deeply personal journey where a runaway teen finds themselves on the lonesome (and often scary) desert highways that make up Petria. But no, this is not that kind of game. In fact, the various teenagers you control are never given a name or personality. They are just one of many missing kids the news uses to whip the gullible audience into a frenzy. A conduit to tell the real story of Road 96.

When you peel back the runaway teenager conceit, what you have are the intersecting stories of eight strangers who are all connected by a deadly event that happened in 1986. We're introduced to each of these colorful characters in a series of vignettes that range from sweet to sad to genuinely scary. A small part of the story will be revealed every time we run into these strangers, giving us a better understanding of Petria and the people who live there.

We'll be introduced to a fellow runaway named Zoe, who is a bit of a kleptomaniac with a strong independent side. Speaking of missing teenagers, there's also Alex, a genius with technology who is searching for more information about his biological parents. Sometimes the shoe is on the other foot, as is the case with Fanny, a Brigade-hating cop who is searching for her own missing teenager.

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Another person you'll run into is Sonya Sanchez, a self-absorbed news anchor who has gotten rich and famous for carrying water for the authoritarian regime. Somehow, she's connected to a couple of bungling burglars, who claim to be her biggest fans while robbing $14 dollars from a fast food restaurant. And let's not forget about the creepy taxi driver, who may or may not be a serial killer. Each of these stories seem separate and unconnected at first, but as election day nears, you'll start to see how all of their paths will intersect in fun and satisfying ways. This is the closest a video game as ever come to being a Robert Altman film.

No matter which runaway teenager you're controlling, the goal is always the same -- stay alive long enough to make it past the wall. This isn't as easy as it sounds, because everything from walking on the side of the road to hitchhiking will decrease your health. You'll need to rummage around for leftover food and find safe sleeping spots in order to stay healthy, and even that may not be enough when you finally attempt to escape Petria. No matter if you're hiding in the back of a truck, paying a coyote to sneak you across or literally climbing a mountain, crossing that wall is not an easy task. You never know what obstacles are going to get in your way.

All of this works because the story is genuinely compelling and the conversations are well-written. We get to see the conflict and polarization from a bunch of different sides, and the decisions you'll make along the way can be gut-wrenching at times. But, at the same time, a lot of the moments are funny. I always looked forward to running into somebody like John, an oversized teddy bear of a trucker who reliably made me smile. And just as quickly as you laughed it up with John, you'll fear for your life whenever the creepy taxi driver shows up. The game is good about switching moods and even genres without any warning, making each play-through feel both unpredictable and exhilarating.

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The sessions are also unique, which is important because you'll hit the road seven different times between June 11th and election day. The game knows that you're going to be repeating the process a bunch of times, so they keep the repetition to a minimum. You can earn new abilities and information that will open up new aspects of the road trip, and even when you see the same sights and location, they will be changed by the passage of time. And with the drum beat of the story growing louder with each play-through, there's never a point that feels like filler. There's something special and memorable about every session, even if it's just you playing air hockey in a bar you're definitely too young to get into.

If you're going to force me to come up with things I don't like about Road 96, then I would have to point to the sometimes inconsistent presentation. For the most part, I like the cartoony look of the world and characters, but there are times where it looks closer to a PlayStation 2 cinema than a modern video game. I'm specifically talking about the clips from Sonya's news show, which sees her awkwardly holding a microphone that never once looks convincing. Thankfully, the stylish art direction helps to overshadow a few of the lesser moments, but I wish the graphics were more consistent.

I'm also a little confused about the size of Petria. There are sessions that will see us traveling more than two-thousand miles over the course of a few days, suggesting that this is a massive country that you won't easily escape. However, you'll keep running into the same strangers no matter where you are on the map. It would be like Fanny pulling you over in Seattle one day, only to have Fanny pull you over again one day later in Dallas, Texas. Not only is that a 31-hour drive, but you would think that it would be thousands of miles outside of her jurisdiction. It ultimately doesn't matter because the story is so good, but I will admit that I spent a lot of the game scratching my head trying to make sense of the mileage.

Will this be something you remember after playing Road 96? Of course not. When you look back on your time hitchhiking across Petria, you're going to remember the colorful characters, the politically-charged story, the lessons you learned on the road and that one time you got into a high-speed pursuit with the cops. You're going to remember this for being a truly original adventure that sees runaways get into deep and thought-provoking conversations with characters you actually want to hang out with. Except for the guy who may or may not be a serial killer, but that goes without saying.