Every Journey Starts with a Single Step

The award winning sensation is finally available on Xbox One and Xbox Series X|S

Road 96, a wild, scenic road-trip that takes you through beautiful places and encounters with people who are on your journey to freedom, is a great place. Here’s a chat with DigixArt Entertainment CEO Yoan Fanise, about this ever-evolving story-driven adventure inspired by Tarantino, The Coen Brothers, and Bong Joon-ho, made by the award-winning creators of Valiant Hearts and Memories Retold.

What Motives Did This Background Get You to Choose for Your Adventure Game?
It was a very serious topic that we wanted to discuss. Route 96 about our life’s choices as teenagers but in a colourful and immersive adventure. The goal of the road trip was not to highlight any particular social problem but rather to show how society is doing. We mixed many references, from all political systems, and we created the authoritarian nation of “Petria” from that. You might see it looking like American deserts. Or maybe European mountains. But this is not intentional, as the same topics are found in many other societies. Road 96 may be fun to explore and play, but players might also find it entertaining.

Were You Trying to Shed Light on Current Affairs that Don’t Normally Get Tackled in Games?

Yes! It’s okay!We want to expand the range of subjects and try (at least from our side) to see this art develop. We are truly happy that it’s resonating with players.

Take a Road Trip!
My dream was to create a story about a road trip. To create a system where your choices really change the next step of your trip, a metaphor for life’s choices. You know, these moments where you take a decision that will shape the rest of your life, and at that point in life you don’t even know it yet, I find it fabulous! If you take a look at the past, your life can be full of butterflies. In a game you have the chance to make it, again and again, it’s a second chance, it’s magic.

Is it difficult to write such an open-ended game?
Our system was complex, and we don’t always know what sequences will be. This is why we worked with our team to develop it.  Although our prototypes allowed us to understand the limitations it might have on the narration, it took us a while to rewrite and playtest it. This framework was so useful that we now accept the inability of talking about the time of the day and how close it is. Is that Fanny? Do you know her character well? The end result was that it was fun to understand the system and to see how the many situations worked in each case.

Which was the biggest challenge?
Mastering the unknown was it. When you have “hundreds of bricks of script” that can be combined in any order, the mathematic result of combination is so big that we have to accept there could be some weird transitions. But we did our best to limit those occurrences,  and from the players‘ reactions, it seems we did a good job.

Is there a message you could send to your audience?
No one’s road is the same in this adventure, hit the road to discover your own path, it will be fun, it will be sad, it will be scary, it may make you think about problems you never thought of before, and we hope you’ll enjoy playing it and be proud of your ending.

Yoan, thank you so much for your time. Road 96 can now be purchased on Xbox Store for Xbox One or Xbox Series X|S.

Road 96

Ravenscourt Games

☆☆☆☆☆
17

★★★★★

$19.99

Road 96 can be described as a wild, scenic road trip. You will discover new places and meet people along your personal road to freedom.
This story-driven adventure is constantly evolving, inspired by Tarantino, The Coen Brothers and Bong Joonho. Valiant Hearts creators.
Action, exploration, contemplative sadness, encounters with humans, and other bizarre situations are all part of the experience. Set against the backdrop of oppression, authoritarian rule.
Road 96 is a combination of a beautiful visual style, a great soundtrack, and a multitude of routes that allow each player to create their own story.