Road 96 is a road trip game. A pretty easy way to summarize it, that both explains everything and nothing at all. What it is really about is an attempt to escape the country of Petria and cross over its border. Driving, hitchhiking, or even just catching the bus to get closer and closer to freedom. The trip to the border has to be completed multiple times, helping different teens make the journey over and over again, with each trip being completely different. 

The gameplay in general is kind of hard to explain. It wears a lot of hats. Most of the game involves dialogue with different characters and making choices that will have effects on your next run. Something that you do on your first trip may come back to bite you on your second. In this way, it is similar to a Telltale game or Life is Strange, but there are also multiple minigame sections to break up the dialogue. Heaps of them, in fact, and all of them suitably varied. You also have to manage the exhaustion and hunger of the character you are playing as, making sure you don’t force them to keep walking if they are about to pass out.

When travelling from place to place, or sometimes at a rest spot, you will come across one of the game’s six characters. While there will often be one of those minigame sections when you are with them, most of the time will be spent talking to them and learning more about what they are doing out on the road. You’ll find out why they are there, what they are trying to get away from, and what their opinions are on the country. You will only see each character once per trip, but each time you bump into them they will have been affected by their meeting with you in the last trip, often mentioning the last kid you played as directly. It’s very interesting the way the game makes you feel like you are changing the world when each kid you play as does very little individually, but you as a player can change a whole lot.

One issue that is heavily present throughout the game though is that the political messages as a whole feel incredibly derivative and heavy-handed. Road 96 is strongest when dealing with interpersonal relationships and individual issues. The second the game tries to address more widespread problems, it resorts to using very obvious and not very clever allegories instead of creating its own story. The wall at the border, the election with an incredibly high number of abstained votes, the terrorist accident that occurred in 1986. On the 11th of September in 1986, specifically. Not very subtle.

The game does do a decent job at playing grey morality when it can, though. Showing that neither side is completely in the right, whilst still very clearly showing a side that is in the wrong. It doesn’t attempt to make you empathise with the villains of the game, but it does make you question if the ends always justify the means.

These moments never felt forced, it just felt like it was reminding you that while one side might be objectively better, it doesn’t always mean they take the right course of action, and it was handled more tastefully than a lot of other games that try to tackle similar topics.

The soundtrack of Road 96 is also phenomenal, you can pick up cassette tapes throughout the game that you can play in any car that you drive, and sometimes a character giving you a lift will let you pick the music too. Every track is memorable and I very quickly had a couple of favourites that I would switch between whenever I had the chance. The non-diegetic music is also great, it fits the atmosphere and does a sensational job at carrying the emotion of any given scene.