Road 96

Road 96 is a first-person narrative adventure set in the fictional country of Petria, somewhere that feels like a fever-dream cross between late-Soviet Eastern Europe and a 1990s American highway. You play a nameless teenager trying to reach the border before a rigged election locks the country down for good. The catch: every run is procedurally assembled from a pool of handcrafted scenes, so the order in which you meet the cast, the detours you take, and the story threads that surface first will shift from one playthrough to the next. It is not a roguelite in any mechanical sense. Think of it more as a story deck that the game shuffles and deals to you, and the shuffling actually works. The heart of the game is its ensemble. There are six or seven recurring characters you will encounter hitchhiking, working petrol stations, running illegal card games, or hiding in motel rooms. A dogged idealist cop. A road-trip-obsessed college kid. A world-weary revolutionary. Digixart gives each of them enough screen time across multiple encounters that you genuinely start to look forward to bumping into specific people again, curious how their arcs are resolving. Small minigames punctuate the scenes, nothing demanding, mostly used to break up dialogue: a lockpicking section here, a rhythm sequence there, a choice about whether to steal gas or beg for it. These are not the point. The conversations are the point, and Digixart writes them with real warmth and occasional sharp political edge. The procedural structure does create some unevenness. Because scenes are modular, emotional beats can occasionally land out of order, a revelation feeling hollow because you have not yet met the character it concerns. The voice acting ranges from genuinely affecting to slightly flat, and a handful of the minigames overstay their welcome. The game also front-loads its slowest material. The first hour or two ask for patience. Stick with it. The payoff in the final chapters, once the election storyline and the individual character arcs converge, is substantial enough that the slow opening earns its place. What makes Road 96 land harder than its modest scope suggests is the soundtrack. It is phenomenal. Curated licensed tracks from artists like Ennio Morricone, Laurent Garnier, and Teenage Fanclub are woven into specific scenes with genuine editorial intention, not just mood wallpaper. There is a sequence involving a character, a car radio, and a song I will not name that is one of the better audio-narrative moments in recent indie games. Digixart clearly thought carefully about what music was playing when, and it shows. At roughly six to eight hours for a full run, Road 96 knows its length. It does not pad. It ends when it has said what it wanted to say. For players who want branching systems, deep mechanical choices, or combat, this will feel thin. For anyone who has ever loved a road movie, a coming-of-age story, or a game that uses its world to say something about power and ordinary people caught inside it, Road 96 is exactly as good as its reputation suggests.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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