Road 96: An ode to our Youth

After picking it up on Steam before Christmas, I finally got around to playing Road 96 and upon completion, I had to write about the experience.

It was an obvious choice for my purchase being in the mood as I was for a more narrative-driven game but being utterly compelled by the game’s description “Hitchhike your way to freedom in this crazy procedurally generated road trip. No one's road is the same!”

Before the gameplay even begins, Road 96 puts itself forward as a direct pastiche of a Trumpian America completely self-aware of its own lack of subtlety. The authoritarian nation of Petria is ruled by President Tyrak who is seeking re-election after massively expanding the country’s oil industry, “revitalised” the nation’s car manufacturing industry by banning imports and having built a wall along the country’s singular northern border.

It is here when the analogy is flipped on its head and YOU the player character becomes relevant. This border wall isn’t designed to keep filthy, foreign immigrants out, it’s there to keep people like you in.

I began my story as a nameless, voiceless female teenager of around 16 walking along the side of the road, coming across and abandoned petrol station. Ahead of me, overwhelming the skyline is a single highway display board stating something along the lines of “Vote Tyrak ‘96” accompanied by the face of the titular president. In the desert around me lies endlessly long oil pipelines with the occasional nodding-donkey dotted in-between. As I head towards the Petrol Station, the first components of the game’s plot is set out by two posters. One asking you to call a given number should you find any “missing teenagers” and another asking you to call another number if you have any information about a radio. The phone booth that I then spot standing to my character’s left makes a heavy suggestion that making phone calls will be an important function of the gameplay ahead.

As I go into the petrol station, I am introduced to - what is in practical terms - the game’s primary narrative function. Although I don’t know it yet, the way this game links its narrative together despite its procedural design is through its 6 main npc characters who you meet throughout your journey. Before me, a small child who is evidently skilled with electronics is tinkering with a… thing (look I can’t remember alright and it’s not particularly important). From this character, who I learn is called Alex, I receive some further plot context and am then invited to assist them in retrieving a key which will assist them in their tinkering. It is here that the primary gameplay is revealed. Within each “level” - each being based around meeting a specific character - you will be made to participate in some sort of minigame (or in some instances a puzzle) which will allow you to continue with your journey. In this instance the minigame revolved around using a magnet to drag a key through an electrified maze. It was easy and underwhelming. Following this, a police car arrived and myself and Alex found ourselves hidden and overlooking the 2 officers. I was then given the opportunity to (through one of two methods) attack and harm these police officers. At this early stage of the game, I had no knowledge of how police officers would go on to behave or about what the state of Petria did to captured “missing teens” or indeed frankly what the dangers of following the game’s prompt to attack would be. So I was pleasantly surprised when the game facilitated my reluctance to follow its prompt and allowed my character to actively refuse to harm them.

That level was then more or less complete and I was given a series of options for continuing my journey: hitchhike, pay for a taxi, steal a car or simply walk. Given I wasn’t aware of how rare money was nor how my stamina functioned and being cautious, I decided to hitchhike. This led to a level with a character who drove a big-rig and involved me shooting criminals with a nail gun. This pattern of level-minigame-progress your journey, continued a few more times and I slowly got to learn more about the world I was travelling through. There exists a militant organisation group called the Black Brigade who apparently led a terrorist attack at the boarder to kill Tyrak many years ago and are planning something similar before the election of ‘96. The phenomenon of teenagers fleeing their homes to try and cross the border and escape the country is incredibly widespread (as evidenced by the player character themselves) and apparently very few survive the journey. The Police will regularly arrest teenagers for no reason on the assumption that they’re trying to escape the country and will send them to somewhere called “The Pit”.

After learning all this, I finally came to a level which was unlike the others in that it consisted of continuous walking and no mini-game. It was clear that at this point I was very close to the border and couldn’t help thinking about how short (and easy) the game had been so far. Soon I came to a waterfall behind which was a cave. The game then prompted me to graffiti something which either expressed support for voting against Tyrak, promoting a rebellion against him or suggesting the best thing is to look after yourself and just escape the country in despair on the cave wall. I then went through the cave, towards the blinding light of the world beyond it and towards the final level, the border crossing itself. It’s here where the philosophy of the game becomes its most self-evident. I had previously taken note of the fact that when speaking with characters, I was often given the opportunity to make one of 3 statements (one choice for the 3 philosophical outlooks outlined by the graffiti I just mentioned) which would then go on to have “consequences” for me choosing that option.

The game then moved me onto the final ‘level’. It was at here that I became a tad overwhelmed. The game was displaying on my HUD a variety of routes for escape and I had no idea what any of them were, how viable they are or if I can test any of them first. I also found a rock under which the game allowed me to store money. Being entirely unsure of the purpose of this game function, I decided to hide away a $20 note. I approached a pop-up store selling various titbits and asked the gentleman there about crossing the border. After he chastised me for speaking about such things so loudly, he asked me “Can I trust you?” in that way that suggests he could be potentially helpful. At the time I considered where my character was at, as decided to choose the response “I don’t know.” As honestly, I wasn’t sure if who I was playing as was trustworthy or indeed if I trusted this man. Sadly, the game decided that was objectively the WRONG option and I was prevented from gaining any further help from this npc. This is certainly a problem the game suffers from throughout the 7ish hours I spent playing it. At some times, the options given to the player in dialogue are phrased within the context of what ONLY the player character knows and is done holistically to allow (for example) the player character to take no action and the plot will progress naturally from that decision to be passive like I experienced at the start of the game. However, particularly as we get to the end of the game, not only does the ability to be passive when faced with a decision disappear, but the choices a player can make during dialogue become increasingly based upon the context the game assumed the player has irl and not that which the character in the game possesses. Either logic is individually fine, but when it gets mixed as this game sadly does, the confusion inevitably leads to practical gameplay failures.

Speaking of which, when I made the choice to follow a specific HUD marker which took me away from the border crossing and up into the mountains, practical gameplay failures were exactly what I was expecting to face ahead of me when I realised that the game was locking me into taking this route despite not knowing what I was picking nor that I was making a final decision on any gameplay aspect. Nonetheless, I slowly headed through a series of dexterity challenges and slowly climbed the mountain which had been dominating my horizon for the entirety of the game. And so, slowly I progressed up the mountain and my character’s stamina bar slowly dropped. There were a series of ‘random-chance’ sections which could’ve easily seen my character fall to her death and die and yet, whilst I was oblivious of the severity of the threat, I survived. Merely two stamina points away from death, a sudden cut-scene of a silhouetted figure trudging towards the peak of the mountain I had been scaling played, the view of the world beyond Petria I was heading to obscured by fog and before I knew it, the game was over. A voice over recounted the rarity of someone successfully crossing over the border and I couldn’t help but say to myself “That was quick?!”

Naturally my ignorance was soon eliminated. The cut-scene was replaced by another of a TV news segment. Clearly from a politically biased channel (Fox News style), it recounted how the fightback against the Black brigades was going well and how massively well Tyrak was doing in the pre-election polls. The segment was ended by the host leading into a report on the missing teenagers and before me three… cards? Each with a stylised silhouette and stamina bar and amount of cash and it was here I realised the format of this brilliant game. I wasn’t just one teenager hitchhiking across America, sorry Petria, I was all of the teenagers yearning to escape this authoritarian nightmare and against all costs either make a better life for myself or ferment the change needed to make a return possible.

The details of my subsequent playthroughs of the game are irrelevant and would be basically spoilers anyway. It was here, before I had even chosen my 2nd player character to journey onward with, before I’d even met all of the npc characters who all had unique stories to tell and through which the beauty and inner-meaning of this game revealed itself that I came to understand the true meaning behind this game. A game in which the metaphor and pastiche didn’t merely end at the scenery or the lore which you would slowly uncover throughout your playthrough. Here, I came to understand the analogy to our own reality (although an admittedly a euro-americancentric one) was based in the very foundation of the gameplay. This game was an ode to the youth of today.

In the same month where polling in both the USA and the UK has brought forth the revelation that the age-old-adage that “people get more right-wing as they get older” isn’t fundamentally holding true for the west’s latest generations: Gen Z and Millennials. Defying all trends, the latest data shows that the youngest in our society are defying the trend in ways that Gen Xs weren’t even able to do and are becoming increasingly radical and anti-capitalist as they age.

Unlike other media, which has sought to reveal the cause of this generational defiance of the political norm, Road 96 is inspired by the youth of today and takes the idea of going on a ‘political journey’ and superimposes it into a facsimile of our own world. Equally, it ties this facsimile irrevocably with the very physical and deadly journeys which a great many of the world’s global south have made to reach the sanctuary of western nations through the simple inversion of a border wall not being to keep others out, but being o keep our own in. Young people across Europe and North America are increasingly finding great empathy for those who travel to escape geo-politically unfortunate circumstances as a result of the increasing detriment of their own circumstances and Road 96 ties this political consciousness together beautifully through its simple inversion of a political reality many have been living for the last few years.

Despite all this, Road 96 doesn’t hold the young of today so high on a pedestal beyond the reasonable realities that young people are experiencing. Just because on average young people are more left-wing and socially conscious, doesn’t mean that all young people are so inclined. Anyone of my own age can freely tell you of those who they’ve met, for example, at sixth form collage who as a result of the growing culture war have taken on an increasingly degenerate and fascistic ideological view. In particular, young men who are often (but not always) taken up by incel-culture will rebel against the growing social consciousness just like so many rebel against the political views of their parents. It is cool to be unique, to not be like all those other people. All those SJWs and commies with their silly little ideas.

In Road 96, whilst the natural circumstance of the player character is being someone wanting to escape, it isn’t possible to play such a reactionary type. But through its dialogue choices and (perhaps more importantly) graffiti choices, Road 96 highlights and separates out the primary reactions an anti-establishment youth might have the frankly bizarre political circumstances of our times (as is perhaps crudely typified by Trump, sorry Tyrak). There are those who, to various ends, through the absolutely excessive awfulness of our world’s environmental and political situation have resorted to proposing absolute revolution against the political status-quo. Also, there are those who have committed themselves absolutely to replacing the boogey-men which act as the face of the current crisis as the solution: “All that matters is getting rid of [insert generic right-wing bogeyman here]”. And finally, those who look at all that is happening and through perhaps depression or sheer exhaustion simply reject it and choose to move beyond the realms of the immediate problem and focus inwardly on themselves as a form self-soothing.

Unlike me, Road 96 offers up no commentary on which of these three choices it views as the most legitimate. Instead, it focuses its narrative on the inner-complexity of the people at the bottom of this political crisis. The political terrorists, the police, those who take justice into their own hands. As you make your way across this broken nation trying to “cross-over”, you uncover and explore the lives of those who live below the hyper-reality of those bogeymen and their political opponents who create and perpetuate this crisis. Indeed, in its very gameplay the fundamental message from Road 96 is, regardless of your outlook, to hold empathy for all those who exist below the dramatics of political machinations. Even those who perpetuate, knowingly or otherwise, the system in their own way are better persuaded against the prevailing, destructive order when the dogmatism exemplified by the irl culture war is disregarded and a consideration and debate of our material conditions are focused upon.

The experiences of young people in our western world are forcing them to explore a level of political consciousness perhaps not even so widely explored by a single generation. Road 96 is a game built out of admiration for our young people, its gameplay is inspired by the experiences of young people and makes a hopeful prayer that they will go on to be effective in their defiance and not be neutered by the forces that be.