This game was Road 96. Its copy describes it as “an ever-evolving story-driven adventure inspired by Tarantino, The Coen Brothers, and Bong Joon-ho.” Its Wikipedia entry says it also draws from The Goonies and Porco Rosso. It resembles none of those things. But don’t worry, it’s still pretty funny, and it’s way better than the Goonies, I promise you: it is way better than the Goonies.
Road 96 opens with a personality test. I love personality tests in games. They’re maybe the #1 way to win me over. I do not know how your answers shape your journey down Road 96. I do know the game called me a loser when I said I mainly travel alone. I know its second set of questions asked how I would behave if I lived under a tyrannical dictator. That’s pretty heavy stuff, they don’t ease you into this at all, that is when I knew this would be a game with a message, which is why I chose “I ain’t gonna do jack shit.” Cuz I’m wild like that. The final stage of the questionnaire asked why I watch movies and I don’t remember what I chose cuz none of the answers were “to see people get blown up or kicked in the nards.” Anyway this game was developed by French people.
I expected this to be another Telltale-style joint. It’s not. It is a first person adventure. You can move around somewhat freely. You have a limited inventory and collect currency. There are a few action-y bits. It actually feels pretty ok. The first stage of my adventure found me on a highway, beside a broken down cop car belonging to Officer Fanny, who seems to be about 4’8" and very, very lonely. She forces me to help repair her car. She tells me about her runaway adopted son, whose parents were revolutionaries who died in a 9/11 they helped to plot 10 years before. She shares an awful lot with me, a runaway teen she’d met 2 minutes ago. She lets me go. I immediately hate this game and dread future attempts to make me feel empathy for a cop, even if she is a very small one.
(Spoiler: My dread was mostly unfounded.)
Your goal in Road 96 is to travel 1000+ miles of highway, reach the Canadian border, and flee America. The country is not called America, its map does not look like the USA, but it is America okay. After my encounter with the cop I think I chose to hoof it down the highway. That trip cost me 3 health or so, which I recovered by eating some rotten food I found in a trailer park. Throughout this game I suffered no discernible side effects from eating garbage. I think someone told me it impacts your dice rolls at certain points but I dunno, I think I failed to persuade people or hack ATMs, like, twice, so if you’re playing this game please do not be afraid to eat any fucking filthy thing you find on the floor. Live fucking mas.
The trailer park is covered with campaign posters and giant graffiti that says GO VOTE and people you can talk to about voting. Every single person in this game wants to talk about voting. If you deface the campaign posters the game lets you know your choice has made an impact. I did not know what that impact was. I still don’t. It’s probably all very obvious, but sometimes I don’t pay attention, because I own a cell phone, and I check it often to see if anyone’s sent me a love letters or money. I am very popular.
In the trailer park I meet a manic pixie dream grrrl. If you befriend her you can borrow her favorite instrument and engage in some first person tromboning. I did not get a video of this. It was much more competent than the Last Stop piano scene, but it still managed to be almost as good, because I kept shouting “I’m tromboning!!”, and that’s funny, because I’m an idiot.
Zoe is also heading for the border. This nation has a teen runaway epidemic so all the adults are always talking about -Teens-, all saying it like they’re Citan Uzuki. I do think classifying teens as some kind of fearful alien species is wise, though this game doesn’t go as far as I would like. It’s still kinda pro-teen. It’s a shame.
I hitch a ride with a trucker. He is a big bear of a man. He keeps nodding off while driving. It’s up to me to keep him awake. I play music, I honk horns, I climb into the back of his cabin and make him the energy drink pictured above. I play refrigerator sokoban to retrieve the cucumber. There is no liquid or ice in the shaker. I think the ginseng was actually just a piece of ginger. Big Bear shares the Omen Vitality with me. I feel so alive. This is what I want video games to be, sometimes. I just want to do the dumbest shit in the world, all the time.
I visit a diner and commit some crimes. It is okay to shoplift, crack safes, eat floor food, or play lotto*. The owner of the diner catches me because I forgot to close all the drawers and doors after looting the place. I believed I didn’t have to cover my tracks, because this is surely another dumb adventure game where my actions don’t really matter. I was wrong. I escape his clutches and steal a car using a key I found in that diner. There are so many car keys left in lockers and drawers in this America. I started to feel slighted whenever I couldn’t find one.
I pick up a hitchhiker. We talk about politics, and what’s on TV (politics). I anger the drifter. Was it because I chose that third option above? I can’t recall. He begins quizzing me, at gunpoint. I have a laugh answering his questions, thinking nothing bad could possibly happen to me. But then he pulls the trigger, and my -Teen- dies, a mere 38 miles from the border.
GAME OVER
I am reborn as another -Teen-. This game has -Roguelike Elements-. Its sequence of events is somewhat -Randomized-. That is such a surprise. My new -Teen- is much cooler than the previous one. His journey begins at a bar, which is owned by a Bizarro World version of me**. I am forced to become a -Teen Bartender-. I mix drinks for all the alcoholics. I make no mistakes, until the very end, when the murderous drifter returns, but he does not kill me this time. I am so fortunate. To be alive, and to be a teen bartender. I love the French.
This time I make it to the border. I get to do more graffiti. My final message to America. I think it was GO VOTE. No one listened. The dictatorship remained intact after I crossed the border. I did not win the game. I play through again and again, my -Teen- selves becoming more and more radicalized. Now my graffiti is all about telling society to sit AND spin. Eventually I put an end to tyranny…but with great cost! Cuz I told a child to build a suicide bomb, oops, maybe I shouldn’t have done that.
Anyway this game rocks, it is incredibly funny, I am not sure how much of that is intentional but it really doesn’t matter, its politics aren’t quite as icky as I feared (but I will not vouch for them in any way), every single time you tell someone “Maybe voting will help?” is a good comedy-style joke, choices are frequent and often ridiculous, its action minigames are mostly slapstick, actually now that I think about it characters are frequently eating shit in a sorta Raising Arizona way, maybe that blurb wasn’t totally ridiculous, I genuinely enjoyed this fucking thing and recommend playing it with friends, Final Score Being a -Teen-: 5.5 out of 5.
*Lotto is perfectly legal but you wouldn’t know it from all the fucking howling all my friends were doing as I was playing it. God, I won so much money from those scratch offs, I’m very good at gambling, stop giving me grief whenever I decide to live it up, people!! Let me enjoy my scratchers!!
**Bizarro World Me is not as cool, not nearly as attractive, and clearly doesn’t stay up all night worrying about losing his liquor license.