To be frank I hate survival horror. Zombies don't do it for me. I got recommended this game as "well made" and "tests your decision making skills", and my backlog was running thin so I said sure, what the hell, let's out-decision-make some zombies.

20 minutes of intro and 8 hours later, my mind is blown. I can't remember when was the last time a game has gone full "let's see you think your way out of that, tough guy" on me like that. The closest thing I can think of is the later floors of Slay the Spire, and even that doesn't quite capture the full extent of the mind fuckery going on during every second you spend at that police station.

Where do you go now? - Everywhere's interesting, but you need to decide where's the best payoff, and go for it. You have a small and meager bag, so what are you taking with you? - Every item is useful and important, but you need to separate the nice-to-haves from the got-to-haves. Crap, this seems like a bad situation - do you tap into your pile of 7 shotgun shells you've accumulated with infinite patience for the past 3 hours? You're going into a new zone, are you really feeling brave enough to go it minimal with a gun, a knife and a healing item, and hoping for the best? But on the other hand if you burden yourself with a grab bag of supplies 'just in case', what are you going to do when 20 minutes into your excursion you run into a large critical item in the middle of nowhere, and then you have to decide which one of your precious pieces of survival equipment goes in the trash? Or are you going to backtrack all the way to the nearest safe room to deposit items then all the way back -- which is an infuriating experience, incurs the risk of running into various costly surprises on the way, and most of all is an admission that now you're paying the price for your weak risk management aka cowardice? How do the alchemical properties of red pot plants play into this decision? What room was that safe in again? Integrals, matrices, cosines floating around your head...

If you're the kind of player who can appreciate an experience like that, I really can't recommend this game enough. After the police station it gets more action-y, but those 8 hours alone make the game worth it.

What is Road 96?

A campy political narrative-driven episodic survival horror roguelike (or, as I've alternately heard it: "procedurally generated walking simulator with permadeath"). If that sounds insane to you, that's because it is. In this game you play as a sea of faceless, nameless teens, each trying in succession to road-trip their way out of the country of Petria, as they flee from the iron fist of the despotic President Tyrak, who -- following a terrorist attack in '86 -- rose to eminent power, Drained The Swamp and Built the Wall.

There's a lot to like about this game. Apart from its multiple endings and surprisingly good soundtrack, probably the main reason is its absurdly refreshing, genre-busting concept. In what other game do you get to say "wew, I spawned super far from the border this time so good thing I just found this bag of cashew nuts, also that artsy girl NPC's epic quest to upload a bunch of damning evidence to wikileaks is two thirds of the way through, I still have my mind-activated food voucher from the rabid news anchor and the blue party is up +4% in the polls, we may win this yet"? In what other game do you control a sequence of political victims who go from horrified pushovers to an army of miniature Jason Bournes who can talk their way out of every situation, break any lock and hack into any computer? Also, in what other game do you find anything like the pure lunacy of trying to complete a run and cross the border in this game?

Let me paint you a picture of how this typically goes. You reach the border, and then "Let's see here -- I've got $47, an oxygen mask, a bag of marbles, a USB stick that can auto-hack any Windows XP machine, a hospital clown's phone number, a pan flute and 5 energy units. Let's do this". You spear-dive into a water reservoir by the border checkpoint, swim underwater to the other side using your oxygen mask, float back up, and throw the marble bag by the feet of the nearest guard. He trips, which bolsters the success rate of your skill check to silently move past him from 30% to 45%. You pass this check by the skin of your teeth only to encounter 5 Humvees full of hostiles who immediately open fire at you. With a split-second reaction you parry all the bullets using the pan flute and reach the border wall, then climb the wall after bolstering your rock-bottom motivation by a strategic quick phone call to the hospital clown. But then the guard cat pounces on you. You have the tuna can, right? Wait, you don't? Listen, the tuna can was right there inside a locker at a dilapidated motel that you passed by in map 4 out of 19 of your run. If you failed to pick it up you have no one to blame but yourself. Now your skill check to evade the guard cat has a 15% success rate, and I shouldn't have to tell you where this is going. The cat's screeching meows summon 17 armed guards to your location. They forcibly overpower you and throw you in a cell where your eyelids are taped wide open and you are forced to watch re-runs of Tucker Carlson Tonight for the rest of your waking life. Game over, and don't try to pull the same stunt again with your next teen and bring the tuna can this time; the Tyrak regime has learned from this experience and dried up the reservoir.

Having waxed poetical about the good, I am also obliged to mention the bad. I won't mince words, when I say this game is campy I mean it in the full sense of the word. Road 96 has last-century production value, and insofar I am qualified to judge the writing, I judge it as not great. The order in which you encounter scenes is random a lot of the time, which forces the 6 NPCs (who are the stars of the show) to spoonfeed you an exposition of their connections with each other repeatedly, 30 times each. More generally the storytelling in this game just has no subtlety; characters plainly shout their motivations at the top of their lungs, and act as simple caricatures more often than not. I don't know if it was on purpose, but the game did in fact remind me of a 90s game in many ways, whether it's the plethora of absurd mini-games (air hockey! Racing! Play 'bella ciao' on the trumpet! Bartending! Man the Gas pump!) or the way its mechanics remain exactly as simple no matter the effect on the audience's willing suspension of disbelief. e.g. you can vandalize Tyrak's posters in front of his sea of guards and supporters, with no consequences; you can be inside a locked car with a serial killer, with a gun pointed to your head, and you will have the option to unironically break the ice with "so... You're gonna vote on September, right? We're getting rid of Tyrak?" because that's how the game is built, you have that option in every dialogue, serial killer or no. In fact 70% of the work in politically deposing Tyrak, should you choose that route, is done by vandalizing his posters and throwing one-off talking points at his die-hard supporters. I will carefully say that based on my own experience, politics doesn't work like that.

The Prequel: Road 96 -- Mile 0

If I am reading my Google and Wikipedia correctly, the original Road 96 was published by a small studio that, at the time, had never tasted anything resembling proper commercial success. After showing this game's demo at an expo they were bought out for an undisclosed sum (7 studios including this one were acquired for a total of ~$300 million). The first Road 96 spread by word-of-mouth, or, to put a finer point on it, by the sheer incredulity of people digesting the fact that yes, someone had actually made the game they just played.

So, looking back, a sequel or a prequel or another quel of some sort to Road 96 was inevitable. Still, when it was announced, I could not contain my instinctive response: "Hah! Really?". The original game was a wacky, self-contained pearl -- lightning in a bottle that could only be captured by a singular stroke of genius, daring and a complete lack of self-awareness. Replicating it seemed impossible, and building upon it also seemed a tenuous proposition. In response to my skepticism the devs just shouted YOLO and showed me that if they were able to produce an entertaining roller-coaster that completely disregarded all my notions of good taste once, they could do it again, and even more emphatically this time. With two games now in the Road 96, uh, franchise, I can say one main thing to characterize it: the highs are very high and the lows are very low. One moment you're saying "wow, they really nailed this", and the next you're saying "come on, seriously".

I will stop talking around the issue. This is a game about an unlikely connection between two ostensible political enemies, peppered by intermissions that are instrumental pieces that you roller-skate / QTE through while evading obstacles and collecting rings (which doesn't really literally happen, it's just a metaphor) as the country around you slowly descends into a fascist dystopia. That's right: you're playing West Side Story meets Sonic The Hedgehog meets Nineteen Eighty Four. Two or three of these instrumental intermissions are -- definitely not master strokes of art, but also definitely master strokes of something. If you don't mind spoilers I invite you to watch The Attack in '86 which is, read this carefully, a ring-collecting obstacle course through which a broken girl works out her falsified memories of a terrorist attack at a political rally, while her friend tries to force her to confront the fact that no, it didn't happen like that. Also Ten More Years of Tyrak which is reminiscent of the bad trip the protagonist of Catherine experiences regarding his crippling fear of commitment.

I must give the game's climax its due credit: it is the dankest possible climax they could have written, given the game's premise. If they had outsourced the climax to the internet and said "top comment gets to pick what happens in the game's climax", the top comment would be the exact thing that happens, in the exact way that it happens. What other games can lay claim to that particular distinction? It's a very short list -- I would say maybe SOMA and Untitled Goose Game. Also I must give credit to the game's lapses into amazing displays of self-awareness, such as an over-the-top newspaper delivery mini-game where everything and everyone reacts accordingly to the fact that you just threw a newspaper at them; and, also, everything to do with Tyrak's son Colton, whose swing you are honored to push in what is a truly transformative experience.

As for areas where the game could have been better, one major point is that the marketing says "your every choice matters" and that's... not technically a lie, but the closest something can be to a lie without crossing the line. This claim was clearly made to appeal to the sort of people who nagged the devs to add the 'Stay loyal to the Dark Lord' ending in Tyranny. Actually in the Road 96 Prequel your every choice affects one of 2 karma meters, which in turn modify maybe a total of 4 lines of dialogue and force your hand in 2 major decisions, each of which modify 10 more lines of dialogue (and, granted, decide whether 2 supporting cast members survive or not). Also, the game's opening sequence is a narrative train wreck. It tries to say "and then, following that monumental loss, an unlikely friend appeared, who comforted Kaito in his time of sorrow", which is well and good, but to communicate this, this friend appears out of nowhere inside of a psychedelic dream sequence while loudly playing the trumpet as Kaito repeatedly moans "ow, stop it, ow". That's, excuse my French, too clever by half.

So anyway if you want to roller-skate your way through a deranged crowd of political fanatics shouting "ten more years! ten more years!" then let's face it, you don't have an alternative. After this they're going to make a deckbuilder horror FPS about the political rise of Tyrak, and a Puzzle Racing Visual Novel about Tyrak's replacement rebuilding NATO; and who am I kidding, I'm going to pay for those, too. So here's to 10 more years of Road 96 madness. It's happening, and it's my fault. I'm sorry.

Your favorite game's "awesome story" merely goes through the motions when portraying conflict

The protagonist mulls over destroying the food supply of an entire town to gain some strategic advantage. The team pipes in: "Are we really doing this?", Alice asks; "I guess there is no other way," Bob sighs, and that's that. Once the deed is done the town mayor's elite guard chases the team and shouts: "You will pay for this!". The chase sequence is over. Total casualties: twenty people, and seventy thousand more in a month or so. The incident is brought up exactly once later in the game, where Alice notes that "we maybe overdid it blowing up that food supply". The game is full of this kind of stuff, and is hailed as "exciting" and "eventful".

Your favorite game's "awesome story" is carried by an episodic plot

This is a flaw so old and so pervasive that Aristotle complained about it: just one thing after the other. Oh no, we've got to hit the road! Oh no, the chariot broke. Need to get spare parts. Oh no, the nearby village is full of killer robots... Oh no, the killer robot repellent stocks are in the next village over... Oh no, the people of the next village over are starving and hostile... Oh no, all the emergency food rations have been claimed by bandits, and the bandit leader refuses to negotiate on account of the roadblock to the southeast, etc, etc, etc...

Now of course this is less of a problem if the audience is at least forced to concede "wow, that was some experience dealing with the chariot breakage", "wow, that was some experience getting the spare parts", "wow, that was some experience dealing with the killer robots". But in practice stories are often built this way in a futile effort to achieve a magic gestalt effect where a sequence of forgettable episodes is somehow more than the sum of its parts.

Your favorite game's "awesome story" is one of those pieces of 'environmental storytelling'

Imagine a person who claims that in terms of pure gameplay mechanics, walking simulators are generally superior to soulslikes. They explain that it's exactly the fact that walking simulators do not involve strategic decision making, hair-trigger reaction times, or skill with controller input, that makes them typically such a master class in mechanical design. Because you see, these things are all crutches, and the superior philosophy is for the game mechanics to engage with the player without relying on these crutches, as the typical walking simulator does.

This is what it sounds like to me when someone extols the virtues of the "amazing story" in a game where none of the characters have friends, families, conversations, goals, fears, or first names. At that point you're way past "less is more", you're practicing narrative homeopathy. I'll grant maybe the game is a compelling piece of art, and that's something different.

Your favorite game's "awesome story" robs the player of a basic sense of agency

It is generally not awesome for the player character to join a cult, agree to assassinate their boss's boss, cheat on their life partner, pick a side in a major power struggle, voluntarily inject themselves with an experimental nano-fluid, etc, without the player's consent.

Your favorite game's "awesome story" is a 5-hour affair fit into 50 hours

Half a book page's worth of plot. 4 sidequests, 10 errands, 80 points of interest, 3 broken bridges, 2 days of real time. Half a book page's worth of plot. Repeat.

Your favorite game's "awesome story" falls apart the moment you try to put yourself in any character's shoes and consider their supposed motives and means

There isn't a dull moment: backup plans are revealed, friendships are made and ruined, alliances are brokered and broken, bold gambits are attempted and thwarted. But wait, didn't Alice swear to destroy her father's company? So why did she agree to call in a favor with that elite mercenary unit last mission, when we decided to run a crucial errand that helped stabilize the same company? And where were these mercenaries back in mission 1 the moment things went south and we were surrounded by 30 armed bad guys? Also, isn't this the third time already that Eve's changed her allegiance? At this point the Nutella conspiracy that she is orchestrating goes, what, four levels deep, and she has been able to act perfectly and maintain the deception for each level so far until revealing the next?... "We will bypass the front security using this special security-bypasser that I have assembled for this mission", says Qarxas the alien; this useful contraption has never been brought up before, and will never be brought up again. See also: mind control, parallel universes, get-out-of-death-free cards and time travel. Of this, H. G. Wells famously said: "If anything is possible, nothing is interesting".

Your favorite game's "awesome story" at its core has, let's be tactful and say a pathological fixation on things as opposed to people

The story's central conflict is fundamentally and entirely about the nuke and the facility and the energy field and the virus and the organization and the protocol etc etc. The people are set pieces; at best they get to momentarily be people while caught up in all the above, at worst not even that.

For some reason sequels are extra eager to walk into this trap, thinking the energy field and the virus are what made the original so compelling, so this time let's have the story revolve around 3 energy fields and 8 viruses. Actually what made the original so compelling was the distraught scientist who worked herself half to death on a vaccine and got all the players to root for her because hey this is just like that time they pulled 3 all nighters in a row on that project. Unfortunately the sequel kills her two minutes into the intro, so as to establish that virus #6 is not fucking around and everyone is in really serious danger this time.

Your favorite game's "awesome story" is just a bunch of jerks speaking in riddles over and over

Come, friend; it's time that all questions be finally answered, and all mice go back to their holes, and the mighty be brought low. Or were we ever friends at all? Are you going to surrender to these doubts or push through, like a mother pushes through when she gives the gift of life? Can we break free of the past? Can we forge a future? Have you stopped to consider whether we should? What price are you willing to pay to make that happen? Can you tell the difference between good and evil? Truth and fabrication? Competent prose and whatever the hell this is?

This game was memed so much that going in, I had surprisingly little knowledge of what actual experience I should expect, so here are some of my spoiler-free notes. These by no means cover everything relevant to know about the game in advance, just some things that jumped out at me.

• This game borrows heavily from the immersive sim tradition. A lot of "quirks" will seem immediately familiar to anyone who's played Bioshock or any of the Deus Ex games; most prominently the hacking system, the "caper" framing of most tasks and the multiple possible approaches to each of these "capers".

• I won't blame anyone for calling the exposition and the setting "cringey", "cheesy" or "over-the-top" but to its credit, the more the game progresses the more the setting matures and comes into its own. By the end I was eager to engage with the setting on a more meaningful scale, even more eager than the game ultimately allowed for.

• Choices kind of matter occasionally and for the short-term only. This isn't Tyranny or Mass Effect. You can set the flavor of what the main character says, but the course of the plot is mostly set in stone. Exceptions to this are sidequests, where a wide array of outcomes is possible; and endings, of which there are about 4 or 5 that you can unlock depending on whether and how you resolved some sidequests. The game won't mollycoddle you about your ending choice, be ready to live with the consequences of your actions.

• At some point 1/3 of the way into the game the deuteragonist Johnny is introduced (this is Keanu Reeves' character). The thing is, by that time you've spent exactly enough time immersed in the game's various factions, conspiracies, pushes and pulls to care about them much more than this Johnny, who at first comes off as a distraction, an obstacle. But having played the game, in retrospect I can say most of the narrative effort of the main plot is spent on Reeves' character. The rest of the main character's problems, friends, enemies, hopes and dreams just kind of come and go and pass him by, sometimes very abruptly. When you see Reeves' character just buckle up and accept him as the main act from that point on, for better or worse. If your immediate thought is "I can't stand this asshole" then by all means, spend the game stewing in that thought.

• Yes, this game has the infamous "AT HIM! Where's your pretty stealth build now huh" third act conga line.

• There's a point in the game where you say to yourself "hey, I'm a badass now, I can handle myself". But before that point there is a phase of early game hell where you had better mind your own business and stick to the main plot and to quests where the danger is "moderate". I played on hard difficulty and in the early game, getting involved in any ongoing incident or high-level sidequest was a death sentence, no matter what clever strategy I tried. YMMV obviously.