Political Propaganda Dressed as a Road Trip — A Bad Game and a Worse Sermon
I came for a narrative adventure. I got a partisan lecture wrapped in condescension.It is evident that the game itself is precisely what they purport to satirize — namely, latent authoritarianism and brainwashing.
Let me be clear: I am not here to argue Republican vs. Democratic policy. I believe both parties' approaches have legitimate merits and real drawbacks. Reasonable people weigh trade-offs differently. That is precisely what makes this game so offensive — it is not interested in that complexity. It is interested in making you swallow one side whole.
Let me be specific about the border wall, because this encapsulates everything wrong with Road 96 .
In reality, the U.S. border wall debate centers on external immigration control — a sovereign nation determining who enters its territory. Reasonable people disagree on methods, costs, and humanity of implementation. But the stated purpose has never been preventing citizens from leaving. Emigration from the U.S. is not prohibited. The wall's real-world framing is defensive: facing outward. This functional transformation of the wall exists solely to twist complex real-world issues into a convenient "good vs. evil" narrative — when in fact this issue carries different moral weights from different perspectives. This is utterly shameless.
Road 96 inverts this completely. Its wall faces inward, explicitly designed to trap citizens inside a dystopian state. This is not "reinterpretation" or "artistic license." This is deliberate factual distortion. The game takes a real political symbol, hollows out its actual meaning, and stuffs it with opposite content to force a predetermined conclusion. The wall becomes a prison fence. The debate becomes "authoritarianism vs. freedom" — not because the game earns this framing through worldbuilding, but because the developers assume you're too lazy or too aligned to notice the switch.
This happens everywhere. The "red party" is transparently the Republicans, painted as cartoon villains without coherent ideology. The "blue party" is never meaningfully defined, yet we're meant to root for them reflexively. The "Black Brigades" are literal terrorists, yet the narrative keeps nudging you toward sympathy. Every "choice" is rigged. The game doesn't ask what you think; it tells you what to think, then congratulates you for agreeing.
In this game, anyone who supports the red party or has any connection to it is portrayed as irredeemably evil. Meanwhile, rebels are automatically righteous — even when they are literally doing wrong things, the protagonist simply accepts it without question. You cannot choose to deviate from their mandated "blue party" path. This is disgraceful. If you are making a "party game" in the political sense, you should state that upfront in the description. I do not want to be dragged into your propaganda.
The indoctrination is not subtle. Characters deliver speeches directly to camera. News broadcasts are strawman caricatures. The protagonist — a child — parrots sophisticated political analysis the game never let you develop organically. This is not storytelling. This is ideological delivery infrastructure, using interactivity as a compliance mechanism. Click A to agree. Click B to also agree, but sadder.
As a game, it's mechanically thin. The road trip structure is repetitive, the survival elements are shallow, and the "randomized" encounters quickly reveal their limited pool. But these flaws pale beside the fundamental dishonesty: Road 96 markets itself as player-driven narrative, then strips away all genuine agency for political theater.
I play games to escape, not to be captured. I do not want politics in my leisure time. I especially do not want politics this crude, this smug, this one-sided, brainwashing, and shallow — this insistent on making me perform agreement with pre-chewed conclusions and manufactured symbols. Real policy debate acknowledges complexity. This game fears it.
The occasional strong character moment or decent music track only makes it worse — proof that talent was squandered on propaganda.Not recommended. Not for anyone who values their own mind.
Don't let politics invade games. Don't let politics ruin games. The greatest stench of this game lies in forcing you to accept their political views.
