Road 96: Mile 0 PS5 review. When Road 96 released back in 2021, it duly impressed with its non-linear, free-flowing narrative about individual hitchhikers and wayward teens attempting to escape the clutches of a fictionalised authoritarian regime. As you might well be able to tell from the title, Road 96: Mile 0 is a prequel to the events chronicled in the 2021 release and while this budget morsel doesn’t attempt to capture the sweep and scope of Road 96, it nonetheless succeeds in both providing an effective origin to that game and a laser focus on the weighty societal issues that creator Yoan Fanise has been so keen to impart to his audience.
Road 96: Mile 0 PS5 Review
A Lively Though Less Ambitious Prequel That Still Manages To Surprise
Owing to its budget and scope of production, Mile 0 is a more narrowly focused effort than Road 96. Not only is the game far less broad from a design perspective, but so too has the cast of protagonists has shrunk to just two – Zoe, the teenage daughter of a high-ranking Petrian minister who also happens to feature fairly extensively in Road 96 itself and Kaito, her same age friend from a working class family that is struggling under the crushing economic oppression of the regime.
Completely different individuals with their own beliefs and histories, Zoe and Kaito begin Mile 0 as the best of friends and as you can probably guess, it’s up to you whether or not they stay that way by the time the credits roll. For its part Road 0 does a great job of making you want to keep the two youngsters in each other’s orbit too, since despite the class chasm that exists between the two, they both enjoy each other’s company, share similar dreams and spend a good chunk of time just hanging out and having fun.
The thing is, though both of them are essentially good folks, the way that they approach different situations is very different. In one scenario, Zoe has the opportunity to take on Kaito’s paper delivery job in his absence. The thing is, the whole thing is told from a manic and overexaggerated first-person perspective where Zoe is going around town and is literally battering folks in the face with newspapers in order to ‘succeed’ at the activity. It frames the whole job of paper delivery seem in a whimsical fashion because Zoe essentially just doesn’t care and throws the papers with reckless abandon and doesn’t see it as a job, whereas for the folks who normally do the paper round year in and year out, it must be anything but and speaks to Zoe’s class privilege as a result.
As it turns out, these much more arcade style orientated sections permeate Mile 0 throughout its duration and certainly serve to both separate it from the more consistently dour proceedings of Road 96. One of many psychedelic skating sequences for instance (and they all have banging soundtracks, for the record) has Zoe and Kaito tearing through two different versions of a neighbouring settlement called Colton City. Twinned to the theme of propaganda, Zoe and Kaito find themselves racing through the idealised version espoused by the government propaganda which is full of vigour and colour and the actual, real-life rundown version which Kaito attempts to use in order to convince Zoe not to trust everything she hears from the government.
And it’s this conflict that sits at the very core of Mile 0’s narrative – whether Zoe sides with the government and believes they know what’s best for the people, or if she sides with the rebellious Kaito and his street level view of what the regime is doing to regular people. In terms of how this choice is executed within the confines of Mile 0’s design there are key points in the story where you’ll get to choose one of a number of conversational responses and actions which show deference to the government or not and thus results in one of a number different game endings as a result.
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Much like Road 96 before it, Road 0 also allows players to project their political choices on the environment at large too. Once more you have the option of tearing posters, mending them, tagging them with anti-government agitprop or even just painting walls with a non-political message – all of which results in your faith and doubt in the regime sliding further towards each opposing extreme as a result. Perhaps the real beauty of Mile 0 though is in how well it effectively breadcrumbs its world building to allow players to make up their own minds about the regime. Indeed, much of Petria’s lore is often found in the trash, with discarded health insurance documents revealing just one healthcare provider that is funded by the state and thus (potentially) ultimately corrupt as a result.
Road 96: Mile 0 then is a much more streamlined effort than Road 96 itself and doesn’t boast anything approaching the freewheeling non-linearity that made the 2021 release so very compelling. That said what Mile 0 manages to do really effectively is provide a deep origin story for one of Road 96’s most memorable characters all the while giving players a much deeper meditation on the socio-economic issues that made Petria the sort of place that you would want to go on a road trip on to escape from in the first place (as evidenced in Road 96 itself).
At just over five hours long with scope for additional playthroughs depending on whether you’re sympathetic to Petrian regime, rebel against it or fall somewhere in-between, Road 96: Mile 0 belies its budget price with a surprisingly choice-stuffed narrative that doesn’t match the broad calibre of Road 96 but is nonetheless still worth playing all the same.
Road 96: Mile 0 is out now on PS4 and PS5.
Review code kindly provided by PR.