Specifically, the plan is to merge Deep Silver, Prime Matter, and Ravenscourt into PLAION, with the parent company set to publish all of their titles going forward. This process, however, won’t be an immediate one, with the company confirming that it will take up to 12 months, and that the three labels may even continue to put out titles over the next couple of years. According to a PLAION representative, only five or six jobs will be affected.

Of the three labels to be dropped, Deep Silver is, of course, the oldest and the most high profile, with a number of major games and franchises under its belt, including the likes of Metro, Saints Row, Dead Island, Chivalry, and more.

Prime Matter, meanwhile, was established only in 2021, and has published the likes of Dolmen, The Last Oricru, Scars Above, and The Chant, with System Shock Remake and Payday 3 still in the pipeline. Ravenscourt is best known for recent games like Road 96 and the Let’s Sing series.

This game follows best friends Zoe and Kaito. If you played Road 96, you’ll recognize Zoe as the rebellious runaway who plays a big part in taking down the despot of the fictional country of Petria. Fans of the original Road 96 will also be happy to see other familiar faces in a handful of cameos throughout the game.

"It carries the same visual DNA as Road 96, for better or worse. Itas heavily stylized so it looks great in stills, but everything feels… unrefined in motion."

Kaito, on the other hand, is probably less familiar to most people. While he’s new to Road 96 canon, he is an existing character from Lost in Harmony, DigixArt’s first game from 2016. You’d gain a fair bit of insight if you’ve played that game and are familiar with the characters and themes because Road 96: Mile 0 kind of just throws you into his narrative. The opening moments of Mile 0 have Kaito remembering his late friend Aya as if she is a person the player would have a connection to, although that wasn’t the case for me. While you can still level with a character being sad about a friend that was lost in a tragedy, I felt like I was missing something, like there was a piece of dialogue or a cutscene I had skipped, which was a little jarring.

Similarly jarring is the game’s presentation. It carries the same visual DNA as Road 96, for better or worse. Itas heavily stylized so it looks great in stills, but everything feels… unrefined in motion. There’s a lot of dialogue between characters, and the attempt at lip-synching on display unfortunately looks to be more like random lip-flapping. This is a shame because what is actually being said is strong and even powerful in some cases. Character movements and animations are also pretty far below what I would consider the standard even for this genre of game, which gets a pass in many cases due to its focus on story rather than presentation. Movements are stiff and wooden, which did a lot to keep me from being fully engaged with the game during the regular exploration/dialogue gameplay.

Thankfully, that’s not all there is to do in Road 96: Mile 0.

Whereas Road 96 made an impact with its roguelike gameplay and the many different activities and diversions you could get up to, its prequel seems more content to inject gameplay and even occasionally deliver some story through a particular style of gameplay: a rhythm-based “runner” (your character is usually on some kind of skateboard or roller blades) that feels a lot like Sayonara Wild Hearts with shades of Sonic Adventure. There are lots of cinematic pans around your character while they are on a linear path, lots of loop-the-loops paired with dramatic zoom-outs, and plenty of jumping or ducking to avoid obstacles.

I don’t think this is a suitable replacement for what constituted gameplay in Road 96, but I can’t deny that it’s pretty fun. Each of these stages has some awesome music backing it up, and the shift from reality into more fantastical, bewildering scenarios is a delight. Going from being chased through the streets of a neighborhood by Zoe’s new bodyguard to having that very same bodyguard grow into a kaiju-sized pursuer was fun to see, though I question how these scenes are actually playing out in reality.

"Each of these stages has some awesome music backing it up, and the shift from reality into more fantastical, bewildering scenarios is a delight."

These running or skating stages and their associated QTE moments can increase significantly in difficulty as you progress through the game, which is good. I never got bored with these segments. However, I also never had an instance where I died more than two or three times on any one troubling section. The intended paths and actions are pretty well-telegraphed after you mess them up the first time, and most failures can be boiled down to bad timing. Additionally, restarts are lightning fast so you never lose too much time on a failure. The overall balancing of the difficulty and handling how failures work is well-done.

There are a few other forms of gameplay throughout the game, including a pretty hilarious on-rails shooter where your bullets are newspapers, but the majority of them are these skating segments. Something else that was changed from Road 96 to Mile 0 is the “health”, or more accurately the status bar on the top left of the screen. Whereas this meter indicated a character’s stamina or restfulness in the previous game, it now represents Zoe’s certainty about the political state of Petria. This is where the best parts of Road 96: Mile 0 come into play.

The unlikely friendship between Zoe and Kaito and the politics surrounding their respective situations are the driving forces behind Mile 0. Zoe is the daughter of a powerful government employee and lives a good life in a big house, and Kaito’s family are workers who are viewed and treated poorly amongst the higher class while living in an apartment below street level.

We know Zoe’s ideological stance throughout the original Road 96, but seeing and playing through the events that got her to that point was very interesting. One skating section in particular has Kaito trying to convince Zoe that things are not great in Colton City, and that President Tyrak is basically evil. As you skate and avoid obstacles, you get to see the same city from each of their perspectives, culminating in a visual where the two interpretations are split right down the middle as Zoe is no longer sure of what she believes. It’s really powerful, and that entire segment has a track by The Midnight playing over it which only amplifies the emotion.

"We know Zoe’s ideological stance throughout the original Road 96, but seeing and playing through the events that got her to that point was very interesting."

These scenes and ones like it are what make Road 96: Mile 0 really work, even when the parts surrounding it don’t quite seem like they do. But then again, the entire game is built around making decisions that push Zoe in one way or another, but the nature of the game being a prequel means that we already know what happens to this character after these events. This makes the decision-making feel less important and maybe even a little misleading in practice, though it works for the game’s relatively short runtime. Mile 0 can be completed in roughly half of Road 96’s 8+ hour runtime.

This review covers the PS5 version of the game, and it’s worth noting that the framerate didn’t feel entirely smooth. This is of course not super important for an adventure game, but the style of the game paired with the power of the PS5 should have resulted in a smoother experience, which leads me to believe the issue is down to optimization. The strange storybook-style pop-in that appeared in the original Road 96 is also present in Mile 0, though it is less significant.

This game was reviewed on the PlayStation 5.

The story focuses on two characters – Zoe from Road 96, who leads a rich lifestyle thanks to her father working as the Minister of Oil and Kaito from Lost in Harmony, born in the poorer Colton City. The two become close, and eventually, Zoe discovers some unpleasant details about the country and her father.

In addition to showcasing why Zoe left her home, Mile 0 will also detail events that led to Road 96. In a unique twist, Zoe and Kaito have inner worlds that manifest as rhythm-based sections (not unlike Sayonara Wild Heart) that will affect their growth.

DigixArt CEO Yoan Fanise said, “In Road 96: Mile 0, we wanted to show where Zoe is coming from and why she left her comfortable life. But we didn’t create Mile 0 in a conventional way. We went the crazy route, using metaphorical music sequences where you ride along on the beliefs and doubts of Zoe and Kaito. The funny part is that YOU choose how you want them to evolve.”

Stay tuned for more details on the prequel in the coming months.

"It’s about three times bigger than Kona 1."

The original Kona has received its fair share of praise in the time since its launch, but what are the biggest changes or improvements you’ve made to the gameplay with the upcoming sequel?

Technically speaking, we do not reuse much from Kona 1. The main character model and animations are 100% new, and the same goes for all art assets and things like camera control. The game looks and feel more on par with modern titles, but it essentially remains a surreal adventure / investigation game. To us, the most important changes for a game like Kona is where we bring the player, how we bring him there and the story we put forward. In Kona 1, Carl explored the world with a pick-up truck, and went from house to house to progress into Carl’s investigation. In Kona 2, the player has a boat and dogsled to explore a much more diverse world, which leads to your other question.

How large is Kona 2’s map? How much of an emphasis does the game place on exploration?

I’d say it’s about three times bigger than Kona 1, but it really is a tough comparison. Kona 1 had a central open map, most of it was outdoor and houses were relatively small. Kona II has four regions which all offer different degrees of freedom. In some areas there’s more room for exploration, while in others it’s a bit more constrained. An example I can give is that the player will undoubtedly visit Hamilton’s lavish mansion, which really is a huge place to explore, but for the most part remains indoor. Kona II still is a game that’s all about exploration, but it explores more diverse environments this time around.

The investigation mechanics of Kona 2 seem like an intriguing element of the core loop. Can you talk about how those will take shape in the game and what role they play in the game?

The omniscient narrator is one way of giving details to the player that the eye can’t see (or might not have seen).  Then there’s the journal, which kind of says to the player “you haven’t seen everything there”. Both are relatively optional: Some narration can be skipped, you can also turn them all off, and the journal can be ignored if you want to. The core investigation mechanics are: Observing and interacting with things, and talking to a few individuals. You can clear the game without narration or the journal, but not really by ignoring what the world is telling you.

With surviving the harsh environment of Kona 2 being such an important part of the experience, can you tell us about what form that will take on the gameplay front?

While surviving is a key part of the game, its presence is more for the ambience than for difficulty. It sets a climate of urgency, pushing the player to find out what’s happening. I’d say the balance between survival and adventure mechanics is about the same as Kona, but the execution is better. We want the player to “feel” more of the challenges of the world, while not necessarily have Carl killed by it all the time.

"While surviving is a key part of the game, its presence is more for the ambience than for difficulty."

Will the game place much of an emphasis on combat, or is the bulk of the experience focused on things such as exploration and investigation mechanics?

The bulk of the experience is focused on exploration and investigation mechanics. Combat is there, and more diverse than Kona 1, but exploration and investigation are more diverse too, so the balance is approximately the game.

Roughly how long will an average playthrough of the game be?

That really depends on the player. Kona I could take between 3 to 9 hours on average. A speed runner could do less and a completionist a bit more. If we look at Kona II with that mindset, I’d say between 6 and 12 hours.

For us, not much. With a team size of 8 developers, we can’t really invest efforts in having a Series X version better than the PS5 version, or the other way around. We have a set of quality standards for high end PCs and PS5/XS, another for mid range PCs and PS4/XB1, and lastly one for low end PCs and Switch. Resolution and stability of framerate can vary from platform to platform, but these changes will happen only at the very end of production, just before the game goes gold.

The PS5 features an incredibly fast SSD with 5.5GB/s raw bandwidth. How can developers take advantage of this, and how does this compare to the Xbox Series X’s 2.4GB/s raw bandwidth?

Seamlessly streaming scenes is not only about hardware. There is CPU and memory cost of integrating assets into scenes on the engine side. This is something we worked a lot on Kona II, and something Unity is working hard on too, but we still can’t stream assets into the world at the speed both of these SSDs can achieve. Technically speaking, you need to stream and activate things on other threads to not feel the hiccup while moving around. Unity way of doing that is with what they call DOTS, something that we use but that is still experimental, not 100% ready yet.  But once we’ll be there, and that will happen, then the benefit of high speed is that we could think of making a game where you ride a plane at its realistic speed in a world as detailed as Kona II. Stream everything around the player without any loading, ever. The faster the hard drive, the quicker the details will come into the scene. But then we will be limited by the ram which will fill up quickly.

Both the PS5 and Xbox Series X boast Zen 2 CPUs, but there is a difference in the processors of both consoles. The Xbox Series X features 8x Zen 2 Cores at 3.8GHz, whereas the PS5 features 8x Zen 2 Cores at 3.5GHz. Your thoughts on this difference?

As explained under the two questions above, we are too small of a studio to even try to leverage a single platform’s techical advantage.

The Xbox Series S features lesser hardware compared to Xbox Series and Microsoft is pushing it as a 1440p/60 FPS console. Do you think it will be able to hold up for the more graphically intensive games as this generation progresses?

Yes. Even if it is a less capable console, it still has much more to offer than PS4 Pro or Xbox One X. Since we develop on PC and support all consoles, its existence make a lot of sense to us.

"Kona 1 could take between 3 to 9 hours on average. A speed runner could do less and a completionist a bit more. If we look at Kona 2 with that mindset, I’d say between 6 and 12 hours."

Super Resolution is coming to PS5 and Xbox Series X/S. How do you think this will help game developers?

If by that you mean something like FSR (AMD Fidelity X), then of course this will help. We already use that for Kona II in a way. FSR 2.0 is just a better upscaling algorithm, so supporting it is just a win for everyone.

What frame rate and resolution will the game target on the PS5 and Xbox Series X/S?

Kona II supports dynamic, adaptive resolution. It will render at your screen resolution, but under the hood will scale depending on the workload. We might give the option between high frame rate and high resolution in the settings. We have yet to test if 120 FPS is doable somehow.

What are your thoughts on the Steam Deck? Do you have plans for any specific optimizations for the device?

We think it is a really great device, but we have yet to receive our own kit, so we cannot confirm its support yet.

Based on the choices one makes, new avenues and routes open up. You’ll encounter different characters, some friendly and others hostile; uncover a bunch of secrets and learn more about the authoritarian forces governing the nation; and much more. Perhaps you’ll even change the world.

The title boasts a “thousand” different roads to travel, though some familiar characters may pop up from time to time. Also, regardless of your decisions, the story will continue and who knows what could happen next? Along with digital releases, physical editions for PS4, PS5, Xbox Series X/S and Xbox One will be distributed by Merge Games. Stay tuned for more details on the same in the coming months.