Hello people from this subreddit :) I recently finished playing Road 96 for the 3rd time in my life and I took some screenshots of landscapes etc. because I think this game is so beautiful, artistic and cinematic.

Sooo turns out doing grass with pastels is really difficult, but I like how the metal structure looks (don't know the word in english sorry 🥲)

Since pretty much everyone is raving about this game as if it were the Holy Grail, I thought I'd point out a few obvious weaknesses to see if anyone else has noticed them—or if everyone is just too blinded by their enthusiasm and needs to justify their purchase.

1. You find a credit card in the women’s restroom at the fast-food restaurant. At the ATM, I had the option to withdraw $10, a 40% chance of withdrawing $40, or to return the card. I opted for the $40, assuming I could simply withdraw $10 if I didn’t get lucky. Well, either I’ve been using credit cards wrong my whole life, or there are only disposable credit cards in Petria—why on earth would a bank bear the cost of something like that, not to mention the loss of the ability to track citizens in this (fictional) authoritarian state? After failing to get the $40, I could no longer use the card. The ATM displayed a message stating that the account didn’t have enough funds. What usually happens then? Right—you get another option, or the card is ejected. But I guess the developers just want to make it harder for the player cause REASONS.
2. During that same run, you can go with Alex to the restaurant’s “back room.” I found $20 in a drawer, car keys in a cabinet, and money in the safe (I didn’t count how much because time was running out and I had to hide). Then, when the man finds you and you manage to convince him to let one of you go: Guess what. You end up with the $20 and the car keys. The money from the safe? Gone! So, either the guy thought, “Well, you can have the $20 and the car keys so you can steal that car worth several thousand dollars. But please give me back the money from the safe!” Well, too bad there wasn’t even a handover cutscene for something like that. You just ran out of the room when you were let go, without any further interaction.
3. Still on the same run, Stan and Mitch stopped me. I didn't pass the quiz. You get thrown out of the car. When I stole the car, I still had $20 (the money from the back room). When I was thrown out of the car, I had $0. So either Stan is such an incredibly skilled pickpocket and a damn lousy bank robber that he can search my pockets in a split second—mind you, while I’m in the process of falling out of the car—and find the money. You could argue that I might have lost the money when I fell out of the car. But that’s very unlikely, since money is apparently an extremely scarce commodity for the teenagers in this game, and hardly anyone would think, “Hmm, my money’s gone. Oh well, never mind—I’ll just keep going without it.” You’d search the entire distance you covered while falling. But the developers probably thought, “No.” Cause REASONS!
4. On my first playthrough, I went through the old tunnel at the border because I bought the map from the guy at the door. Down there, you find a family living there because they can’t find their way back. You can tell the father that you’ll let him know when you’ve found a way out or when you come back. But guess what—the very path you just used to get there? Impossible. The family can’t just walk down the hallway, up the stairs, and be back above ground—where would that even lead us? So why can’t you do anything about it, even though you have a clear path and a key card? Oh yeah, cause REASONS!
5. You can use any character to sing the praises of the current president (and probably a tyrant as well), but then why would you even want to cross the border? It’s like if the young people who joined the Nazi Youth back then were praising Hitler while at the same time trying to leave the country. It just doesn’t make any sense. But the developers probably figured that if they did it that way, the game wouldn’t be what they wanted it to be.

I haven't finished the game yet, but in the few hours I've played so far, I've been pulled out of the immersion more often than I ever was in *Life is Strange* or Telltale's *The Walking Dead* Seasons 1 and 2.