There’s nothing like a good prequel to set things straight.
Road 96 came out a while ago and brought some interesting, yet relevant content to the gaming world. It presented a balanced dose of serious political conflict with budding friendships and branching choices. Escaping a past to an uncertain future was also thick in its narrative. And eerily enough, the political conflict and manipulation were quite comparable to the United States government landscape at the time, so it was quite easy to fall into and understand.
The original game contains many themes, characters, and situations that are thrown out quickly, and not a lot of time for the gamer to consume it all in one go. Eventually, there is enough info out there that you begin to understand what has gone on and why people are being secretive as they are rebellious. There was a major conflict in the game that revolved around the year 1986 when a tragedy befell the residents of fictional Petria. That catalyst pushed the country towards sympathy and gave control to a tyrant named Tyrak, who was believed to almost die from the incident. In return, Tyrak locked down Petria’s people within its borders, especially its rebellious teenagers, and vowed to capture the culprits who were behind the 1986 tragedy. Of course, a group of rebels known as the Black Brigade, who were blamed for the incident, pushed back and a tug of war began where propaganda ruled the roost and everyone in the game seemed suspect. Road 96 was driven by a good combination of confusion to create a perfectly led branching narrative of a game.
You get people hooked on story and choices, and there is no turning back to the experience.
Anyway, enough backstory for the original game. Let’s talk about this game.
Road 96: Mile 0 is a game that hopes to answer the backstory of Zoe, who was introduced in the original. It goes through her innocent journey of being a wild-child teenager that hangs with her best bud Kaito and morphs into a serious drama about escaping the very country she trusted with her livelihood. It does all this in about 2-4 hours. Along the way, you get some very familiar Sayonara Wild Hearts gameplay structure mixed in with Road 96 branching narrative design. All of it is led by good acting, rocking music, and a sad tale that holds the entire experience up.
On that note, let’s escape into this review.
Story is strong with this one
The story of Road 96: Mile 0 is about two characters – Zoe and Kaito. Zoe, who is from the original 2021 game, is the Minister of Oil’s daughter and someone who lost their mom in the 1986 incident. She is controlled and kept safe by her father and has been somewhat kept in the dark about the exact reason her mom departed her life. Nothing like a good thriller, right?
Zoe’s good friend, Kaito, comes from a blue-collar family that has been separated from their external family by Petria’s borders and rules. Kaito, along with his mother and father, have been desperately trying to reunite with their lost family and leave the confines of Petria. The only issue? They don’t have the IDs to do so, nor the country’s permission. The only way to escape is through a back-alley deal with the Black Brigade, a risk that the family is willing to take in desperate times.
The crux of Road 96: Mile 0’s story is how entangled the two above characters become as they go on this journey together. It also revolves around their trust in each other and the truth that trickles out from each person as they become closer and closer. It’s an endearing story of friendship’s confines and its defensive nature to avoid hurting the other person. The story is incredibly sincere in its intentions to grow these characters into something more than just 2D personalities. The game’s story offers a good amount of background with a sprinkle of mysterious clues on how each feels in their specific sector of life. The story also does a fantastic job of crisscrossing their journey and showing why and how these two very different people came to trust and depend on each other. It’s a tough narrative to put together and this appears to have been carefully crafted to work.
It’s certainly the strongest reason why you want to play this game, especially since it brings more detail and context to Zoe’s future journey in Road 96.
The gameplay – is more of the same and too familiar
Someone on Digixart’s team must have been a huge fan of Sayonara Wild Hearts because the roller skate and skateboard gameplay design was straight from Annapurna Interactive and Simogo’s playbook. While that’s not a bad thing, and most of the time imitation is the purest compliment, some elements of gameplay style look like they were directly taken from SW, especially the finger-snap level of SW. Anyway, we will get back to that design in a bit. I was busting at the seams to mention it and now it has been mentioned. We shall return in a second, or however long it takes you to read the next section.
Now, the story is about a journey and escaping the confines of authoritarian rule. The gameplay structure that was used in the original Road 96 is ever-present and works within that story structure boundary. For a good chunk of the game, you use a first-person viewpoint to search areas, solve mysteries, find solutions to problems, and play around with side quests (such as spray-painting walls or tearing down posters). Along that same path of design, you also do a heavy amount of asking and answering questions that can branch the characters off into multiple directions. Some of them are good, and some of them are not so much. What made the original game interesting and replayable is ever-present in this new game, though certainly not to the extent of the first title. As the first game felt like the branching narrative was untrackable at times, which isn’t a bad thing considering you want replay value out of the series, this one seemed to give up sips of that instead of gulps. Regardless of length and girth, It works just as well, and it will certainly silently encourage the gamer to come back and try things again.
Returning to the top of this section’s discussion, the new gameplay that features roller skating and skateboarding at the end of each point in the journey is well done and well placed. At the end of each section of the game’s story, Zoe and/or Kaito will get on the road and try to ‘escape’ their way to the next part of their journey. This could mean running from a bodyguard that has been ordered to keep an eye on you, or it could be in the form of discovering the truth about what is going on behind the scenes that a character simply didn’t understand or know about. Regardless, the decision to depart from the original gameplay design and go this route was certainly a bold choice. It beats having to cross the border of Petria multiple times, such was the case with the original while providing a sick beat to enjoy.
To compliment and bring out those moments of escape drama, the game also backs the design up with some stunning music. The music accompanies the point of the escape and truly brings the emotional seriousness of the situation to life, either overdramatically or in a ‘just-right’ sort of fashion. It works and makes these escape moments fun. Much like the branching narrative, you’re also allowed and encouraged to replay these moments, which act just like those in Sayonara Wild Hearts, where you are judged on your accuracy and how many little bits of diamonds you collect during those escapes. You’re even given a score and a letter grade. Sadly, Queen Latifah is not included in these moments.
Regardless of how cool these escape moments might be, they do feel a bit unearned and almost wedged in to break up the original Road 96 design of the gameplay. With the original game, it felt like the options for the story were widely branched out. With these escape moments, they contradict the groundwork of the original game and its notion of selective freedom that it offered up to the gamer. Again, it’s not to say that is terrible, it just seems to go against what Road 96 did so well. The adage that if it ain’t broken, don’t fix it does apply here.
Anyway, the gameplay design here was certainly bold and brash with the chances it took. It didn’t necessarily pay off for the story’s flow and structure in the series, but it did change things up enough to make it fun in a different way. Whether changing up the gameplay style works or not will show in the numbers and reviews. No matter how this game pans out, it’s nice to see a developer trying something new. Games should never be stagnant and slaves to their successful structures.
Longevity
The replay value of the original game is huge and high. You can play Road 96 multiple times and still feel like you have more to discover. For Road 96: Mile 0, it feels smaller and less replayable than the first. The change in gameplay certainly fills up some of that replay time, while the branching narrative portions remind us why the original was so great. In total, this game has about 2-4 hours of gameplay in it. When you reach the end, it’s not a certainty that you’re going to return. It does have some replayable moments that you may want to try out, but the consequences of your actions aren’t laid on as thick as the first title in the series.
If you’re looking for a large game with lots of twists and turns driving it, then you might be disappointed.
Let’s wrap this up.
Conclusion
Road 96: Mile 0 is a smaller, different experience than Road 96. While the game’s story helps fill in some blanks and provide some context for Zoe’s journey in the first game, the gameplay style mash-up between branching narrative and linear/on-rails gameplay leaves the experience lacking just a bit.
