Road 96 asks a simple question and then makes you live with it: how far would you go to leave a country that has already decided what you are? DigixArt’s adventure game, published by Ravenscourt, puts you in the shoes of a series of nameless teenagers trying to reach Petria’s northern border in the summer of 1996. It is out on Xbox Series X|S, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, PC and Nintendo Switch.
Trailer, via DigixArt.
Summer 1996, and the Border Is Hundreds of Miles Away
Each run starts far from the mountain checkpoint. You travel by bus, taxi, hitchhiking, stolen car or on foot, and the choice matters. Buses and taxis let you rest and recover energy but cost money. Walking is free and drains your health. Hitchhiking is free and unpredictable — it can turn hostile or violent.
Energy works as health. Buy food or rest to refill it. If it hits zero, your teenager passes out at the roadside.
Eight Characters Who Remember You
Between segments you meet one of eight recurring characters, whose stories build across runs. Among them:
- Sonya, a wealthy news reporter who spreads Tyrak’s propaganda
- Jarod, a taxi driver and serial killer who plots to kill Sonya
- Stan and Mitch, twin brothers who rob their way across Petria
- Florres and Tyrak, the candidates in Petria’s coming election
The game’s politics are blunt. Ten years before the story, a landslide killed civilians during a televised event. The government blamed the Black Brigades. Tyrak ordered the explosion himself to discredit them. Teenagers who oppose him are sent to labor camps called the “iron pits.”
A Road Trip Built on the Coen Brothers and Bong Joon-ho
DigixArt spent two years designing the storytelling system behind the procedural structure. The team drew on 1990s road-trip films and the work of the Coen brothers, Bong Joon-ho and Quentin Tarantino, with characters modeled on 1980s and 1990s film and television. Escape methods came from real accounts of people who lived behind the Iron Curtain.
Each journey ends one of three ways: the teenager is caught, dies, or crosses the border. Whatever happens, you start again as another anonymous teenager, choosing from three with different cash, energy and distance from the border.
The Election Is the Point
Road 96 culminates on election day, and the result depends on what you did across every run. That is the game’s real bet: that a story told in fragments, with no single hero, can still land as one narrative. It mostly does. The procedural structure could have flattened into repetition, but the eight characters carry memory between runs, and their arcs give the randomness a spine.
The energy system is the weakest part. It turns contemplation into resource management and punishes the walking route, which is the one that best fits the theme.
Still, Road 96 is a rare thing: an adventure game about oppression that trusts the player to feel it rather than be told. The 90s soundtrack and the visual style hold it together. The election lands.
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