Taking a trip that delights in the path not taken

Developer/publisher Format Origin Release

DigixArt PC, Switch France 2021

Inside this gas station is a playable arcade cabinet. Depending on when you find it, the game on offer might change to reflect an earlier adventure or set up one to come

W e’re in the sidecar of a motorbike, helping out a pair of ski-masked bank robbers by throwing their proceeds at the windscreen of a police car in pursuit. We’re lifting a set of car keys and the credit card of a petrol-station owner who earlier threatened to call the authorities on our teenage runaway. We’re playing a riff on ’70s arcade game Tank on a makeshift laptop, offering feedback to the child prodigy in our passenger seat, who tweaks the game on the fly in line with each of our design suggestions. These are the kinds of anecdotes you can expect to bring home from a road trip across the fictional country of Petria – and better yet, not every traveller will have the same stories to tell.

“At the end of the game, the average amount of things that people don’t see is about 40 to 50 per cent,” Yoan Fanise, creative director on Road 96 and co-founder and CEO of DigixArt, explains. The French studio, best known for its collaboration with Aardman Animations on 11-11: Memories Retold, has a headcount of just 15. “At the beginning, it was a bit scary,” Fanise says.“We’re going to produce all that, and people will see only half of it? As a small indie studio, we were like, ‘Is this crazy?’”