Road 96 Does Procedural Storytelling Well | My Fav Thing In... (Road 96 Review)
442On the surface, Road 96 looks like any other story-first PC game, but it’s hook is an interesting one. As you can hear in this Road 96 review, this game is a procedurally-generated, narrative-driven game. It sounded really ambitious, but indie studio DigiXart have pretty much pulled it off. Deputy editor Alice Bell recently played the Road 96 game for review, so I wanted to get her on to chat to me about it. Listen to our conversation over top this Road 96 gameplay to hear Alice talk about her very favourite thing in Road 96.
🎥: Want to hear about Alice’s favourite thing in The Forgotten City? Have a look at this: https://youtu.be/TnJ4pQZHunM
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Honestly, it could’ve been a disaster, but after playing Road 96 myself, I totally agree with Alice. Without the procedurally-generated story, I don’t think Road 96 would be as good as it is. The story itself is completely fine, but doling the scenes out in this fashion makes the game stand out.
As Alice goes into in this Road 96 PC review, you play the game as a number of different teenagers. These teens encounter the same characters over and over, but the aforementioned NPCs are meeting new people. So, there’s no real need for John, Sonya or – Alice’s favourites – Stan and Mitch to address chats that happened in the past. As you can see in this Road 96 PC gameplay, this means that that every run-in feels fresh. There are some teeny wobbles – we go into it in the video – but it’s definitely the best part about the game.
If you've enjoyed this Road 96 gameplay and our Road 96 PC review chat (everything said here applies to the Road 96 Switch version, too, in case you were wondering), then why not have a read of Alice’s full thoughts in her written Road 96 review on RockPaperShotgun.com (https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/road-96-review)
My Favourite Thing In... is a video series where Colm chats to one of the lovely RPS writers about their absolute favourite thing in a spang new video game they’ve been playing. In some cases, the writer will have to think long and hard about their choice, because the game they’ve been playing mightn’t be that great, while better games will have multiple things for them to pick.
0:00 Intro
0:58 Road 96 Review and Gameplay
8:30 Outro
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