Road 96 is a procedural road trip game about fleeing a dictatorship
A pleasant surprise
DigixArt, the folks behind 11-11 Memories Retold have announced their new venture, Road 96. It's a procedural road trip game where you play as a refugee attempting to flee a country under authoritarian rule.
Road 96's trailer debuted at The Game Awards and it shows how your road trip can veer from the beautiful and serene, to the highly dangerous depending on who you stumble into on the open road, or hitch a ride with.
"You play as a broken teenager, trying to get freedom and safety past the country border," the devs said in a press release. "As you get closer and the summer passes, the plot intensifies, presenting deep moral dilemmas, dark and intense moments, lots of encounters, places, means of travels and crucial choices that might change your initial goal."
From the trailer, Road 96 looks like a mixture of driving, some hitch-hiking, a dash of on foot exploration, and even getting tangled up in armed robberies. Here's hoping there's plenty of quiet sequences where I can just drive at night listening to synthwave tunes too.
I'm certainly sold, I'm just hoping all the procedurally generated things you'll get up to will actually be meaningful, or at least, not feel like a mish mash of things that'll derail the narrative. Fingers crossed the devs make it work.
Road 96 creative director Yoan Fanise was also co-director of Valiant Hearts before he left Ubisoft to co-found DigixArt.
There's no release date for Road 96 yet, but the Steam listing says it should arrive sometime in 2021.