i am dedicated to finishing this game, and have already completed 1/6 over-arching stories, but let it be known that this game is Not Good and I don't recommend it. The first part of this will be a short, non-spoilery review of the game at its purest form but i'll go more in depth about it's flaws after a warning.
to begin, this game outright lies to you from its marketing. on the steam page and in interviews before the game begins, you are told that every road trip is different with thousands of possible combinations and choices that actually affect the storyline but really... they don't? technically, yes, every run is different, but the stories and situations you find yourself in feel repetitive and predictable. there are 7 (technically 8, but two of them only show up together and have the same personality so I count it as one) characters with their own storyline, and the game instead chops up their personality and storylines into bits that they mix and match around, which leads to the "diverging paths". in reality, your encounters with them don't really matter. there are no real choices, and more often than not you are forced into helping them even when there could have been some interesting writing decisions from disobeying or directly going against their cause. i can't go more in-depth on this without spoilers, so instead i'll move on. the actual over-arching story of the city of Petris and the election at hand feels like an american who discovered politics through the 2016 elections and found out what black lives matter was in 2020, and wrote their surface-level understanding of politics based on that. i do consider myself someone who is more liberal, which is why i want to emphasize with the audience reading this that my gripes with the storytelling in this game are not because of the left-leaning rhetoric in this story. it is because of how blatant the writing is that after playing a single run, i was able to predict every story beat ahead of me. even now, 5 runs in, nothing has convinced me that i was wrong. the game treats the player like someone who is incapable of reading into any nuance or piecing things, and takes no time for suspense or world-building. despite there being multiple forces at play, (republicans, liberals, and revolutionaries) you are never allowed to actually take a side and have it matter. everytime you complete an ending, you are guided to the ending that the game has already decided on. meeting different characters and saying different things does not matter. nothing you do actually matters. and thats where my biggest gripe with this game comes from. it is deeply unsatisfying to play. if you take the choice out of a choice-based game, then at least give me an interesting narrative to follow and care about. road 96 cannot and does not do that. i heard a lot of comparisons between this game and telltale's style of faux-choice-driven stories but personally, i think a big difference is that at least in my experience, telltale games still offer an interesting story. despite the fact that none of the choices i made in the walking dead mattered, i still cared deeply about lee and clementine and their situation, and when the story continued to escalate, i felt enough to cry at the end of the game. instead i played this game for a little under 5 hours and still couldn't bring myself to really care about the white girl who decided to rebel against her republican father or the cop who is potentially a good guy but is forced to do their job for the republican government. there is a chance that you can still care about the characters in this game despite this, but my god don't pay full price for this game. watch a lets play, and if its on a significant sale, buy it then but otherwise, just skip out.
SPOILERS UNDERNEATH THIS
now that i can really get into the nitty gritty, i want to really spell out where the game really falls flat. as said before, you follow 7 characters: Zoe, a teenage runaway whose father is revealed to be the republican totalitarian dictator, Tyrak. John, a trucker who is secretly working for the revolutionary group named the Black Brigades and subsequently lost a lover to the cause. Fanny, a police officer working for the government to detain runaway teens on road 96, who is dealing with their adoptive teen running away to find their biological parents. Alex, a fourteen year old genius hacker prodigy who has been recruited for the Black Brigades in hopes of finding more about their adoptive parents who were about of the revolutionary group. Stan and Mitch, the comic relief that are also highway robbers. Sonya is basically the ben shapiro of this universe. Okay, I'm joking, kind of. She is a news reporter whose show is funded by Tyrak's government and believes that the revolutionaries are nothing but terrorists. Lastly, we meet Jarod, whose daughter was recruited to be apart of the Brigades and killed in action during a protest, and now seeks vengeance against any Brigades directly responsible for her death as well as Sonya.
Now that we've met the cast, I feel like you can see where the puzzle pieces fit in. I'm not sure if the sequences I got were just very unlucky in timing, but I received the biggest exposition and clues about each character in my first encounters with each person. This made the rest of my runs feel really unsatisfying? For Jarod, for example, there is a scenario where you can meet him at an abandoned RV hideout and he essentially dumps the story of his dead daughter on you before revealing that the hideout actually belonged to the Brigades before they were ransacked and found by the government. He shows you his daughter's old RV, and then asks you to demolish a radio tower with him. Immediately after, he gets extremely angry and tells you to leave. Every encounter I had with him after this run, I anticipated more dialogue or exposition about him, but each encounter with him was either vaguely referencing a dead daughter that I'd already learned everything about, or vaguely referencing his plot to find the Brigades, which I'd also already learned about. This happens again with Zoe, who I first met when approaching an active RV hideout on my first road trip. She was causing trouble with the person renting out sleeping spaces, and after you bail her out from the cop, she tells you where you can rest. Eventually, in the middle of the night, she wakes you up and begins to talk to you about leaving (there is also a really fun trombone minigame in this section that has no effect on the story, but I actually really liked) and being a runaway. She tells you, ominously, that she's running away from her dad who is... well, you don't really need to know, just that they disagreed and that she comes from a place of privilege and can't stand being home now that she knows the system that upholds her privilege at the expense of others. then, she tells you she's leaving the next day alone. this was the most vague of Zoe cutscenes, and I actually didn't mind it, but now that you know her basic character, every scene with her feels redundant and too on the nose with no development about Zoe as a person, much like Jarod. She is a troublemaker and a rebel because of her dad. She is a liberal who wholeheartedly supports the anarchists/revolutionaries because of her dad's position. There next encounter I had, she is handcuffed behind a police car on the floor where the police are snacking and fueling their car (or at least, they're implied to be fueling up, but their car isn't taking gas and they aren't eating they're just sitting in complete silence). The gas station is owned by a Tyrak supporter, and you are asked by Zoe to help her escape. It is important to note that in every conversation with characters and npcs, you are always allowed to ask their opinion on the protests/Brigades or Tyrak. You are then allowed to make a choice between supporting Tyrak, supporting Flores (the democratic party), and supporting the Brigades. Every choice tells you in a popup on the screen that it will have a lasting impact, but so far I've really noticed none. Despite this, however, when greeted by a scenario that outright feels like "do you want to support Tyrak or the revolutionaries by helping this teenager?" you are given no option. You cannot do anything except help Zoe, which leaves your character being caught abetting and the both of you being held in the police's car. Zoe tells you blatantly that her dad is Tyrak, before Brigaders come kill the cops and help the two of you escape, taking Zoe with them. Idk, there just isn't much else to say about these characters. I like Jarod to an extent, as well as John. To me, they are the most likeable characters in this game despite also having a fairly one-note personality, but at least they are interesting. I don't even want to get into Alex, who is the most obnoxious character in this game. Constantly referring to you by "homegirl" or "homie", yo! It's so awkward, and the voice acting is this game isn't particularly stellar either. We need to get white people out of the writer's room, seriously.
Aside from the terrible storytelling, there isn't anything left to the game, really. It is driven by its story and the choices you can make, but when the story is bad and the choices mean nothing in the grand scheme of things, then what? The exploration is okay. You have an energy meter to start with, and traveling usually uses a bar or two out of something like 10 or so. You begin each run with a gauge that is usally not filled (you get to pick between 3 lost teens who begin with a random amount of money or stamina), and you can replenish your energy using food or drinks. The biggest issue is that there is no consistency with this system. Sometimes taking the bus takes up two energy meters, while hitchhiking only takes one but sometimes walking along the road also only takes one, or maybe two? There have been times walking takes up 3? And eating a burger usually restores two energy, except when it only fills one. Same with resting and drinking. They can refill your energy one. Or maybe two? It's pure randomness. You can be entirely unlucky and pass out because your character spawns with 2 stamina and the first walking encounter takes 2 as well, which means you die. It's just a weird system. You also pick up perks that carry between runs after certain encounters with each character that makes the game incredibly easy. My first perks were an energy perk from John that means sometimes I can just take no energy from certain progression interactions or open safes/lockers with my strength and potentially gain money or food, which can be used to replenish my stamina or hail a bus that will use less stamina. The other perk I grabbed in my first run was a charm from Sonya that makes chance interactions have better odds, as well as more charming interactions, i guess. This usually leads to an abundance of money in my runs, which means I have basically no threat of dying, which .. makes the threat of this perilous road trip so pathetic. This game just really relies on the story to hold it up, but it's so flimsy. Just don't bother picking it up.
to begin, this game outright lies to you from its marketing. on the steam page and in interviews before the game begins, you are told that every road trip is different with thousands of possible combinations and choices that actually affect the storyline but really... they don't? technically, yes, every run is different, but the stories and situations you find yourself in feel repetitive and predictable. there are 7 (technically 8, but two of them only show up together and have the same personality so I count it as one) characters with their own storyline, and the game instead chops up their personality and storylines into bits that they mix and match around, which leads to the "diverging paths". in reality, your encounters with them don't really matter. there are no real choices, and more often than not you are forced into helping them even when there could have been some interesting writing decisions from disobeying or directly going against their cause. i can't go more in-depth on this without spoilers, so instead i'll move on. the actual over-arching story of the city of Petris and the election at hand feels like an american who discovered politics through the 2016 elections and found out what black lives matter was in 2020, and wrote their surface-level understanding of politics based on that. i do consider myself someone who is more liberal, which is why i want to emphasize with the audience reading this that my gripes with the storytelling in this game are not because of the left-leaning rhetoric in this story. it is because of how blatant the writing is that after playing a single run, i was able to predict every story beat ahead of me. even now, 5 runs in, nothing has convinced me that i was wrong. the game treats the player like someone who is incapable of reading into any nuance or piecing things, and takes no time for suspense or world-building. despite there being multiple forces at play, (republicans, liberals, and revolutionaries) you are never allowed to actually take a side and have it matter. everytime you complete an ending, you are guided to the ending that the game has already decided on. meeting different characters and saying different things does not matter. nothing you do actually matters. and thats where my biggest gripe with this game comes from. it is deeply unsatisfying to play. if you take the choice out of a choice-based game, then at least give me an interesting narrative to follow and care about. road 96 cannot and does not do that. i heard a lot of comparisons between this game and telltale's style of faux-choice-driven stories but personally, i think a big difference is that at least in my experience, telltale games still offer an interesting story. despite the fact that none of the choices i made in the walking dead mattered, i still cared deeply about lee and clementine and their situation, and when the story continued to escalate, i felt enough to cry at the end of the game. instead i played this game for a little under 5 hours and still couldn't bring myself to really care about the white girl who decided to rebel against her republican father or the cop who is potentially a good guy but is forced to do their job for the republican government. there is a chance that you can still care about the characters in this game despite this, but my god don't pay full price for this game. watch a lets play, and if its on a significant sale, buy it then but otherwise, just skip out.
SPOILERS UNDERNEATH THIS
now that i can really get into the nitty gritty, i want to really spell out where the game really falls flat. as said before, you follow 7 characters: Zoe, a teenage runaway whose father is revealed to be the republican totalitarian dictator, Tyrak. John, a trucker who is secretly working for the revolutionary group named the Black Brigades and subsequently lost a lover to the cause. Fanny, a police officer working for the government to detain runaway teens on road 96, who is dealing with their adoptive teen running away to find their biological parents. Alex, a fourteen year old genius hacker prodigy who has been recruited for the Black Brigades in hopes of finding more about their adoptive parents who were about of the revolutionary group. Stan and Mitch, the comic relief that are also highway robbers. Sonya is basically the ben shapiro of this universe. Okay, I'm joking, kind of. She is a news reporter whose show is funded by Tyrak's government and believes that the revolutionaries are nothing but terrorists. Lastly, we meet Jarod, whose daughter was recruited to be apart of the Brigades and killed in action during a protest, and now seeks vengeance against any Brigades directly responsible for her death as well as Sonya.
Now that we've met the cast, I feel like you can see where the puzzle pieces fit in. I'm not sure if the sequences I got were just very unlucky in timing, but I received the biggest exposition and clues about each character in my first encounters with each person. This made the rest of my runs feel really unsatisfying? For Jarod, for example, there is a scenario where you can meet him at an abandoned RV hideout and he essentially dumps the story of his dead daughter on you before revealing that the hideout actually belonged to the Brigades before they were ransacked and found by the government. He shows you his daughter's old RV, and then asks you to demolish a radio tower with him. Immediately after, he gets extremely angry and tells you to leave. Every encounter I had with him after this run, I anticipated more dialogue or exposition about him, but each encounter with him was either vaguely referencing a dead daughter that I'd already learned everything about, or vaguely referencing his plot to find the Brigades, which I'd also already learned about. This happens again with Zoe, who I first met when approaching an active RV hideout on my first road trip. She was causing trouble with the person renting out sleeping spaces, and after you bail her out from the cop, she tells you where you can rest. Eventually, in the middle of the night, she wakes you up and begins to talk to you about leaving (there is also a really fun trombone minigame in this section that has no effect on the story, but I actually really liked) and being a runaway. She tells you, ominously, that she's running away from her dad who is... well, you don't really need to know, just that they disagreed and that she comes from a place of privilege and can't stand being home now that she knows the system that upholds her privilege at the expense of others. then, she tells you she's leaving the next day alone. this was the most vague of Zoe cutscenes, and I actually didn't mind it, but now that you know her basic character, every scene with her feels redundant and too on the nose with no development about Zoe as a person, much like Jarod. She is a troublemaker and a rebel because of her dad. She is a liberal who wholeheartedly supports the anarchists/revolutionaries because of her dad's position. There next encounter I had, she is handcuffed behind a police car on the floor where the police are snacking and fueling their car (or at least, they're implied to be fueling up, but their car isn't taking gas and they aren't eating they're just sitting in complete silence). The gas station is owned by a Tyrak supporter, and you are asked by Zoe to help her escape. It is important to note that in every conversation with characters and npcs, you are always allowed to ask their opinion on the protests/Brigades or Tyrak. You are then allowed to make a choice between supporting Tyrak, supporting Flores (the democratic party), and supporting the Brigades. Every choice tells you in a popup on the screen that it will have a lasting impact, but so far I've really noticed none. Despite this, however, when greeted by a scenario that outright feels like "do you want to support Tyrak or the revolutionaries by helping this teenager?" you are given no option. You cannot do anything except help Zoe, which leaves your character being caught abetting and the both of you being held in the police's car. Zoe tells you blatantly that her dad is Tyrak, before Brigaders come kill the cops and help the two of you escape, taking Zoe with them. Idk, there just isn't much else to say about these characters. I like Jarod to an extent, as well as John. To me, they are the most likeable characters in this game despite also having a fairly one-note personality, but at least they are interesting. I don't even want to get into Alex, who is the most obnoxious character in this game. Constantly referring to you by "homegirl" or "homie", yo! It's so awkward, and the voice acting is this game isn't particularly stellar either. We need to get white people out of the writer's room, seriously.
Aside from the terrible storytelling, there isn't anything left to the game, really. It is driven by its story and the choices you can make, but when the story is bad and the choices mean nothing in the grand scheme of things, then what? The exploration is okay. You have an energy meter to start with, and traveling usually uses a bar or two out of something like 10 or so. You begin each run with a gauge that is usally not filled (you get to pick between 3 lost teens who begin with a random amount of money or stamina), and you can replenish your energy using food or drinks. The biggest issue is that there is no consistency with this system. Sometimes taking the bus takes up two energy meters, while hitchhiking only takes one but sometimes walking along the road also only takes one, or maybe two? There have been times walking takes up 3? And eating a burger usually restores two energy, except when it only fills one. Same with resting and drinking. They can refill your energy one. Or maybe two? It's pure randomness. You can be entirely unlucky and pass out because your character spawns with 2 stamina and the first walking encounter takes 2 as well, which means you die. It's just a weird system. You also pick up perks that carry between runs after certain encounters with each character that makes the game incredibly easy. My first perks were an energy perk from John that means sometimes I can just take no energy from certain progression interactions or open safes/lockers with my strength and potentially gain money or food, which can be used to replenish my stamina or hail a bus that will use less stamina. The other perk I grabbed in my first run was a charm from Sonya that makes chance interactions have better odds, as well as more charming interactions, i guess. This usually leads to an abundance of money in my runs, which means I have basically no threat of dying, which .. makes the threat of this perilous road trip so pathetic. This game just really relies on the story to hold it up, but it's so flimsy. Just don't bother picking it up.
neji
1 year ago