Road 96

I could disregard the story choices that gives the impressions game authors are children (changing a car tyre with a pump? making a crowd boo or cheer by filming with a camera? on what planet does it work?) but the whole is so childish, to the point I could tell it was a french production even before checking that it is actually. Lame unassumed-wokish dialogs, childishing depictions of a poorly invented world. Boring. I've read it was spiritually sort of a followup of Telltale Games: well, Telltales games were never that childish and could bring feelings.

Bearing in mind this is a video game and I'm probably not the target audience, I loved the character development, story, artistry, design and was pleasantly surprised by the "procedurally generated" nature of the game. Typically those particular buzzwords give me the heebie jeebies but in this case it was well executed and improved the game considerably. The music was excellent, voice acting was entertaining (albeit over the top), and the environments beautiful. There were some questionably positioned floating tufts of grass that marred the world design, however, and animations were janky when following an NPC uphill, but I tended to overlook that as this game was clearly not made by a triple-A studio. I found the use of the Antifa logo to represent the Black Brigade to be jarring and inappropriate given current events. Thankfully the story did reveal to the player that members of the Brigade were not always the "good guys". The main villain was an obvious bad guy associated with right-wing government, however the story made it clear that his actions were what made him evil as opposed to his political affiliation. It would have been nice if the use of red to denote right-wing and blue to denote left-wing had been replaced with less obvious color choices. One of the main characters is portrayed as "confused" for having chosen to be a police officer working for the government, which felt very contrived to establish the "woke" narrative and again inappropriate based on current events. I have to wonder how much influence Hewlett Packard's OMEN team had on the story development based on the company's overt political influences they displayed over the past year. Overall the game delivered a solid, emotion invoking story that provided the player with a variety of choices as to how to proceed, and while the narrative feels politically heavy-handed most of the time, it was still worth playing through to the end. Four stars if the "woke" elements were addressed in a patch.