On your way to the border, you will meet many people. Some will be just as anonymous as you, but there is a total of eight special characters to encounter, each with their own backstory to discover: Zoe, John, Sonya, Fanny, Stan and Mitch, Alex and Jarod. And that's the game's main originality. The different teenagers you'll play will be empty shells you will fill when making specific decisions (will you support Tyrak's opponent Flores or the rebellious Black Brigades, or even the tyrant himself?) that will eventually affect the ending. However, instead of playing to learn more about who you are, you're actually playing to find out more about those eight characters. Being a story-driven kind of game, Road 96 isn't going to blow your mind with its deep gameplay mechanics of course, but to anyone who's into the genre, it's sort of a given and not really something worth debating anymore. There is a good number of mini-games to experience, with a good variety overall. You'll see some of them a bunch of times of course, but overall, they are pretty well-implemented in the narrative. Not all of them are easy to handle with a gamepad (let alone a Joy-Con), like the Shufflepuck Café mini-game for example, but they're not difficult in any way. The writing clearly is the main attraction here, as it is usually the case in narrative games, and we're happy to say it is good. It's very easy to get attached to the different protagonists and seeing that the voice of the people is indeed affected by our choices and actions is actually enough of an incentive to keep playing until Election Day, which marks the end of the adventure.

The procedural aspect in Road 96 either affects the order in which you'll play the different sequences but also the environment in which they will take place. Another consequence to that design is that no one will reach the end of the game after experiencing the same scenes. In our case, we only reached 100% completion with three of the eight characters we met, which is why a New Game + is proposed once you have completed your first playthrough. Reaching 100% with one of them means that you have seen everything there is to see about them and so that you know their whole story. If you're anything like us, you're most certainly going to want to discover everything about all of them. That being said, because we could play both the PC and Switch versions, we realized that whatever we choose to do in one scene doesn't always affect how it's going to play out. Although we haven't had time to complete our second playthrough yet, from what we've seen the New Game + doesn't only focus on the sequences we haven't seen which means it also includes those we already know. It is a bit unfortunate in the sense that not that many sequences can turn out differently depending on your actions. Technically, it won't come as a surprise that the Switch version should be much rougher around the edges, with more visible aliasing and pop-up issues, not to mention the framerate dips. It's still playable but it's a bit of a shame that there is no compatibility option with the touch screen. It would indeed make dialogue selection much more practical (even more so when your right Joy-Con drifts like crazy like ours). On PC, the experience is quite logically more polished visually and technically, as proven by our screenshots and gameplay video. Whatever the system we played the game on though, we must say that we truly love the game's cartoonish art style. Voice-acting appeared very solid to us and most of the OST too. French band Cocoon has written a song specifically for this game and we simply love it, but that's because we (I in fact) are into folk more than we (again, I) are into electronic music. The bottom line is that the different tracks are very much recognizable when you hear them outside of the game, which is usually a very good sign.