Road 96 🛣️

Road 96 is set in the summer of 1996 in the fictional authoritarian nation of Petria, where you play a series of teenage hitchhikers trying to reach the border. The structure is procedurally generated road trips — each playthrough strings together a different sequence of encounters, characters, vehicles, and choices, with the cumulative weight of all those decisions shaping not only your own escape but the political fate of the country.

The character cast carries the game. Each named character you meet has their own arc that unfolds across multiple playthroughs as you encounter them in different orders and contexts. Their intertwined stories — a young singer, a corrupt cop, a taxi driver, a runaway child — gradually map out the entire political situation in Petria from the bottom up.

DigixArt, the studio behind Valiant Hearts and Memories Retold, cites Tarantino, the Coen Brothers, and Bong Joon-ho as influences on the tone — moments of action, exploration, melancholy, and absurd human comedy against the backdrop of state oppression. The soundtrack pulls from 90s hits, the visual style is stylized and saturated, and the thousands of possible routes ensure no two playthroughs land the same way.