“Shoot him,” my editor whispered over my shoulder like the tiny little devil man he is as we sat in a conference room not five minutes away from PAX Australia 2022. It was (excuse the term) pissing down that first Friday of the beloved event and instead of joining the rest of the rabble in the main hall, we had been summoned to a hotel nearby to go hands-on with one of our most anticipated new Australian titles, Broken Roads. A true blue Aussie CRPG, Broken Roads is studio Drop Bear Bytes’ attempt to capture the charm, and depths, of classic isometric narrative-focused experiences. Some unpleasantness had transpired in the game and our party had come up against a young man who had no business wielding a gun and, ever the diplomat, WellPlayed’s Zach Jackson leaned in and told me to fire.
Let’s rewind a little though and set the scene. Our time with Broken Roads was tragically short, about half an hour of gameplay all told, but in that window we were given a taste of the game’s character creation tool set, narrative devices and even a touch of combat. Crafting your character in Broken Roads is a detailed process, allowing for class choice as well as riffing on the psychological test approach a la Fallout: New Vegas. Answering a series of questions designed to provoke your baser desires and impulses will eventually place your character on Broken Road’s impressive compass, a colourful and complex visualisation of your moral makeup.
Broken Roads’ Aussie outback is a brutal place
Each section of the compass (Humanist, Utilitarian, Nihilist and Machiavellian) is drilled down into deeper layers of each alignment, allowing for a more nuanced moral system than say Paragon/Renegade. Your actions dictate your placement and your placement will in turn begin to dictate your actions. Be an arse, you’re eventually going to be locked out of not-being-an-arse options in character interactions and so on. Within these quadrants are Active Moral Traits that grant boosts to gameplay, as well as a handy Moral History that tracks your actions and their impact on your compass alignment.
Drop Bear Bytes is smarter than your average bear though, and as we spoke with game director Craig Ritchie it became clear that Broken Roads has no interest in arbitrarily moralised gameplay. Ritchie told us that the team understands that doing bad things doesn’t necessarily make an inherently or eternally bad person, and that Broken Roads will allow you to straddle the line with your choices at times, never truly blocked from a path if you decide it’s time to walk a different one. Given the morally dubious nature of post-apocalyptic worlds, this degree of flexibility in playstyles is a thrilling prospect and one that we can’t wait to see play out in the full release.
Our character creation process leaned further into Nihilism than expected, with just a dash of Machiavellian for good measure, and thus we set forth on the proverbial broken roads. We found ourselves with a small party, moving through the West Australian wastes toward Kokeby Station, one of the game’s settlements, but tragedy crossed our path. A woman is wailing, a man is dead, a boy is standing off to the side, despondent. After some investigating it becomes apparent that the boy has shot his father for reasons we didn’t, or couldn’t discover in time. He still had the gun and something needed to be done before things devolved even further.
The Moral Compass is a complex but flexible tool
In this mini-drama you can expand your options by taking the time to talk to the distraught mother, investigate the surroundings or simply take charge and approach the kid. Conscious of time we did the latter, and our brutish nihilism funnelled us toward some rather blunt words that resulted in the kid sinking further into his distress and threatening to kill himself. Zach, my little shoulder devil, told me to shoot first, and while the option for an outright kill was present, I was also able to shoot him in the leg, effectively disarming him but likely condemning the broken family to a slow death in the wastes.
It’s a potent first taste of Broken Roads, a deliberate foreshadowing of the violent and sad nature of its world and the many ways you’ll be able to engage with it. Elsewhere, our time in Kokeby Station saw us dealing with an errant mercenary whose behaviour was becoming increasingly problematic for the small community. While some earlier chats in the town had shown us the joys of the game’s extensive dialogue options, we took this as a chance to get a taste of combat, and while clearly still under development, the basics feel right. The build we played had combat positioning, allowing me to hide party members, deploy my own attacks and so on. The game uses an AP/MP point-based system for movement and skills, but given how quickly combat wrapped up, it’s hard to talk to more than the basics for now.
In the aftermath of the mercenary’s death, the party and I gathered at the local pub for a drink and a chinwag with the locals. NPCs would openly discuss my actions out in the world and in town, noting how they felt or perceived me now, offering more work if they liked my approach. I was able to barter with the bartender too, a small but very Aussie touch as I attempted to swindle my way into a second, free beer. In these moments Broken Roads feels alive, and while our snapshot of this world was brief, it was overflowing with threads I want to pull on and watch unravel. It doesn’t hurt that the game is gorgeous to look at, boasting a recently reworked hand-drawn art direction that fills the Australian wastes with vibrant locales and memorable character designs.
Broken Roads’ art direction is richly detailed and gorgeous
There’s a level of care in Broken Roads that I find to be its most compelling selling point so far. While voicing all of the dialogue in the game would be a near-impossible task for a studio of this size, Drop Bear Bytes has made sure to include key voiced lines and generic reaction vocals for all significant characters, ensuring you have just enough sound in mind to read lines in the appropriate voice. We also asked Ritchie about the inclusion of indigenous Australian perspectives and voices in the creative process and were told that there had been extensive consultation and collaborative efforts to ensure Broken Road’s Australia was representative and respectful of our country’s actual roots and native people.
It all forms an image of a game that is preparing to take the genre by storm, standing to be an authentically Australian vision of a classic game style that deploys nuanced character work, forefronts player agency and just crackles with aesthetic charm and detail. The development team is stacked with ‘talky’ game legends like Leanne Taylor-Giles and Colin McComb, both of whom have been attached to CRPG mainstays like Fallout, Wasteland and inXile’s Torment series. It’s a stacked deck and from what we’ve seen so far, Broken Roads is almost ready to play a winning hand.
Broken Roads releases in 2023 on PS5, PS4, Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One, PC and Switch.
Previewed on PC // Preview hosted by developer
