izigame.me

Road 96 = Firewatch + Life Is Strange + Unbalanced story-tone + Painfully repetitive elements
I'd 'barely' recommend this game, but I kind-of do - with many words of caution:
The art is lovely, there are TRUE attempts at creating emotional moments and they kind of work, the music is phenomenal (to a point), choice DOES matter (sometimes), you can tell this was a labor of love by the team, there are brief moments that will flash you back to a good road trip if you've had'em in your life - or make you want to take one, and you'll certainly have at least one...mostly enjoyable playthrough.
But now...let's get to the many MANY reasonable criticisms of this game:
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1) Critiquing The Claims of 'Tons of Replayability' and 'Truly Personal Story For You And Your Characters':
Road 96 makes a LOT of promises in the game description and especially in the designer-narrated trailer. It talks about the importance of choices, how you'll play multiple road trips and each one will be unique, and about the role played by procedural generation. These are all HUGE oversells.
This is ultimately a 5-9 hour experience, spread out over 7 episodes. During each episode, you control a different teenage hitchhiker looking to escape a totalitarian country. Each 'trip' is composed of randomly selected story elements. Basically, there are 7 main story characters, and they each have 7 core story moments. During which episode your first 6 travelers encounter the story characters, and which part of their story they encounter are randomized. During those encounters, you can make choices that impact the ending.
There is SOME procedural generation...and it's actually cool: there are long stretches where you can be in a vehicle for the story, and the environment kind of 'rolls up' as you encounter it. If you take a break from making choices, you can listen to the sound track (another great-yet-flawed element) and just watch the road generate. Really though, it has NO impact on play or story (unlike...say...the horribly underrated "Sir, You Are Being Hunted" where the Proc.Gen has a wild and major impact on gameplay).
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2) On the MAJOR CRINGE elements of the Soundtrack, NICKNAMES, Mini-games, and general Repetitive Nature of some Road 96 elements:
The LEAST repetitive aspect of the game is the fact that each of the 7 episodes requires you to complete a road trip to the fictional nation's border, and encounter the same main-story-characters along the way. If anything, this Pulp Fiction / Magnolia / Crash story-telling technique kind of works and THANKFULLY helps you to avoid a second playthrough.
There's a 21-27 track soundtrack that's got a pretty great mix of songs, but unfortunately 2-3 of them get overused to the point that it feels like torture. There is one particularly upbeat "faux jack-johnson 90's 'we're not a church band' church band alt rock band" sounding track called The Road by Cocoon that will make you want to stop playing by the 4th or 5th time you hear it. This is cringe element number one.
Cringe element number two are the nicknames from three characters in particular: "Peachfuzz" "YoungBlood" "DAWG" "Homeslice" and "Homegirl" all get used and reused like a 50 year old in 1994 that discovered the word 'Dude', and again - it makes you want to quit.
Finally, you've got the mini-games. There honestly not the worst, and only 2 of the 10-12 of them get reused. In fact, they shake things up. Still, some of them are forced and others have imbalanced mechanics, that they're just kind of a pain. You also - often - can't escape them easily, and that gets to the false promise of choice issue.
In general, these are three major elements of the game experience that on their own would have been annoying enough, but together at least produce a major oversight by the team. Like they finished the game, played through, knew these would be annoying in the amounts they were in...but then decided they'd put enough work into the game and decided to release it as is anyhow, because at that point they just wanted the project to be done.
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3) On the Tone
This one is....frustrating. The game really does have moments that - in as few as 7 hours - carry the emotional weight of Firewatch and Life Is Strange. Image the core story elements of the game like a jump rope pulled taught by two calm adults. Now picture that same rope getting slapped every which way by two Adderall-laden kindergartners that each just chugged two Redbulls: That's a full 40% of the story telling, where old western slapstick melodramas and 80's Saturday morning cartoon energies get smashed in with...a trying-too-hard batman-wannabe and a few moments of psychological terror?
Basically, the story telling can't decide if it's wants to be Life is Strange or Sam and Max, and the mix...while it looks great in the trailer...doesn't work entirely. There are moments when the slapstick characters become raging psychopaths, and others where a mysterious stranger mock-executes you out of the blue. The vapid reporter's charachter is consistent, but also just tries a little too hard to the point of being cringe, though her role is less detrimental than the other 3 I'm referring to.

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4) On the False Promise of Choice Impact
The game tracks your progress with each main-story-character's story, and by the end I doubt even the most OCD completionist will want to 100% each story with a second playthrough. Part of that is the unbalanced tone. Another part of it is the game's repetitive elements. What really does it though, is how you quickly see only SOME choices matter.
You catch on by the second or third episode when a choice will make a difference or not. That's pretty much when the 'ACTUAL' design of the game Vs what they sell in the 'designers' narrative' trailer reveals itself to the player.
That false promise - along with some misleading conversation options - really start to get irritating when you want to opt-out of activities like assisting an alleged terrorist in a project, or taking part in a police woman's search for a suspect. The conversation has options like "Thanks but no Thanks", only to have the game force you into assisting anyhow.
Now the designers might tell you this is to ensure a cohesive story experience, but that would be false: There are numerous points in the game where - if your journey hasn't revealed certain story aspects due to the sequence you've encountered your 'randomly generated story' - the game will provide cut-scenes to make sure you didn't miss critical moments. This should've been extended to ALL options, not just the ones they selected. It ultimately becomes a glaring blemish on the promises made by the game designers, showing how they over-promised and under-delivered, or at the least, horribly communicated what they had produced.
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5) Edited for character-limit: See comments for full final issue.
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Overall....
Ultimately, this game has just enough good to it - and SO MUCH potential - that I'd say pick it up on sale, give it 8 hours for a playthrough, and keep an eye out for what the studio releases next. I actually this was more like 'The Long Dark', where this was just Road 96 1.0 and they'll do a HEAVY revamp, fixing many of the elements... maybe re-releasing as Road Stories 96 or something....
It really could be great - even with the campy characters clashing with the sincere moments - if they just did some tweaking to their overall design, added a few new lines that reflect a game where EVERY choice you make (in EVERY dialoge session) ACTUALLY shapes your gameplay, and if they toned down the promises of how the 'thousands of ways your story can play out' claims currently come off.