After eternal problems, we can finally play games from the game pass again – and the first one we chose had it all. Road 96 is a very interesting game with lots of good ideas – you can read here how I got on with them.

The description read very interesting. A procedurally generated game about a teenager going on a road trip. No two journeys are the same, and neither is the world around us normal: we don’t take this trip for fun, but to get to Road 96, the only road out of this country ruled by a dictator and oligarchs. Society is finished, just like the economy, and we have no perspective. The only way out we see is to flee.

But how exactly does that work? First the technical stuff: it’s a low-poly game that’s played in first-person perspective. We mainly walk and interact to make our journey to the border. When we’ve crossed the border (or been caught or died before), it starts all over again, with a new youngster; everyone really wants to flee this country.

We have different means of transport to choose from – hitchhiking, the bus, we can call a taxi or even steal a car. With these we then travel from station to station. On the journeys and also at the stations we then meet the supporting characters, whose story and connection to each other we slowly but surely decipher. We can always decide whether and how we want to help, and what attitude we have to the situation in our country – do we just want to flee, does there have to be a rebellion or do we trust in the upcoming elections that are supposed to change everything?

I don’t want to go into detail about the stories, but I can say that they are not only fundamentally interesting, but are also staged very well thanks to the way they were told – you can feel the effects of conversations on another person, whose fate is then somehow connected to the others. There are quite a few lighter plot twists that make the game exciting and keep you playing. And one or the other secret is revealed.

As positive as this all sounds, and as much as I enjoyed the game, there were still a few points I didn’t like that much. First, the buzzword “procedurally generated”. I haven’t liked that word since “No Man’s Sky” and again I didn’t understand how it should have influenced the story. Because the story of all characters is fully developed, including all alternative endings, it has more of a branching story shape – not bad, but not “procedural” in my opinion. The environment always looks relatively the same, so that wouldn’t be a selling point, at least for me.

The second was the decisions. You can have long and very interesting conversations with each character – however, it is always relatively clear where the answers you give will take you. Either you talk for a long time and thus learn a lot about the story, or you get it over with quickly and don’t learn that much. So not much is changing. Maybe you would notice that more when playing through it again, but since you already know the story in principle, I don’t see much appeal in it.

The last sentence is also important for my last point of criticism: at some point you know the story. Or can the remaining few ambiguities rhyme together well. But the fact that you still have two or three runs ahead of you is not so lucky in my opinion. I rather ran through the last two runs because a lot of information was repeated twice and thrice at this point – that was a shame. But it was by no means so bad that I would have stopped the game because of it.

These points don’t make Road 96 a bad game by a long shot, though. I had a lot of fun and at the end I really wanted to know how it would turn out. The ending was okay then. Not disappointing, not stunning – just expected good. There were one or two emotional moments, and you definitely had the feeling of having accomplished something – even if it was a long way there. Some characters really grew on you and you felt that way about their further stories. At this point I would also like to mention again the great sound design and soundtracks, which accompanied the game very well.

I wish there were more games like this one. If we find any, we’ll definitely try them out. How do you see it? Did you like the game? Have you also played it and maybe had a completely different experience than me? Then discuss it with me on Discord!