Road 96 promises the thrill of the open road and the unexpected. Maybe freedom. Maybe death. Plenty in between. The walking, driving, and hitchhiking adventure from French studio DigixArt, coming later this year, taps into the spirit of classic road movies, from Easy Rider to Thelma and Louise, where encounters with the outside world are strange, life-changing, and potentially fatal.
“The road trip structure was the perfect canvas for us to feel the random nature of traveling on your own,” says Yoan Fanise, Road 96’s creative director. “When you travel as a backpacker you don’t know who you're going to meet, what’s going to happen, good or bad. That’s the essence of a road trip, and of life.”
This confrontation with the unknown is just one way that games are proving to be ideal hosts for the road trip genre. What unites road movies and novels, serious or comic, is how they bring the social background into focus, shining a light on cultural tensions and marginalization, all while their characters reconnect with each other, and themselves. A recent crop of road games are doing all this in a way that feels especially pertinent to our times.
Road 96 isn’t just about adventure. Set in a dystopian land that blends ’90s Arizona with Soviet totalitarianism, you play a teenager fleeing to the border, by any means available. Fanise explains that the political aspects of the game have only become more relevant during development. “We started writing this story three years ago,” he says, “mostly inspired by 1989 iron curtain history and the struggles of countries like Venezuela or North Korea. But recently we were shocked by the similarity of real events that happened in ‘modern democracies’ such as the USA.”
Courtesy of DigixArt Entertainment
