Road 96: Mile 0

My honest reaction after finishing Mile 0 was something close to affectionate disappointment, which is a complicated feeling to sit with. DigixArt clearly loves the world of Petria and these two teenagers, and that love is audible in almost every scene. What they built around that love, though, is a smaller and stranger machine than the one that made the original Road 96 memorable. The setup is intimate and genuinely affecting. You alternate between Zoe, the rebellious daughter of Petria's Minister of Oil who has grown up cocooned inside the luxury compound of White Sands, and Kaito, her best friend who watches the same walls from a far less privileged angle. Their friendship is the real subject of the game, and when the writing lets that friendship breathe, with messy dialogue exchanges, a babysitting minigame involving Tyrak's son Colton, a newspaper-delivery sequence that gets wonderfully unhinged, it works. The voice cast is committed, the cartoony visual style fits the material, and returning characters from Road 96 land with the quiet weight of things you already know are going to go wrong. The structural pivot is where things fracture. Road 96 built its identity on procedural generation: every run felt genuinely different, and your choices had real texture. Mile 0 trades all of that for a linear, four-location layout where the events play out roughly the same regardless of the order you visit them. The branching dialogue and multiple endings are present, but players who know the original already know which way the moral compass is supposed to point, so the illusion of meaningful choice collapses fast. The exploration sections themselves are thin: you walk around White Sands interacting with propaganda posters and rummaging through bins to nudge loyalty meters. It is more repetitive than it sounds on paper. The Rides are the wild card. These are on-rails music-runner stages where you skate or rollerblade through fever-dream versions of the story's events, dodging obstacles, grinding rails, and collecting score pickups while original tracks and licensed songs blast through. There is a sequence scored to The Offspring that gets the pacing exactly right, and the best Rides have a magical-realist energy, giant bodyguards, titanic dictators, Zoe's PTSD rendered as an obstacle course. The soundtrack across punk, electronica, and original compositions is the single most consistent strength in the game. The problem is that the Rides read more as music-synced auto-runners than true rhythm games: obstacles do not always beat-match in a way that feels intentional, and depth perception in a few laser-heavy stages is genuinely unreliable. If you approach them on PC with a mouse and keyboard, prepare for frustration. A controller is close to mandatory for the skate sections specifically. At roughly five hours, Mile 0 knows its length and does not overstay it. The ending earns real emotion, more than the wobbly middle section deserves. If you have never played Road 96, there is a surface-level story here about class, authoritarianism, and teenage friendship that works on its own, though the connective tissue to the original is what gives the best moments their sting. If you are a Road 96 devotee hoping this expands the world in meaningful ways, it answers questions but not necessarily the ones you were asking. Come for the soundtrack, stay for Zoe and Kaito, and make peace with the fact that the road itself is considerably straighter this time.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

Be the first to comment on Road 96: Mile 0.