The Aggie Awards – The Best Adventure Games of 2021 page 11
Best Music: Road 96
What's the most important thing for any long road trip? The answer, of course, is a great soundtrack, and the multi-chapter, multi-character odyssey of DigixArt’s Road 96 provides one of the most varied and consistently compelling musical backdrops in recent adventure memory. The quiet moments of your journey to flee the strife-ridden fictional nation of Petria are framed with ambient acoustic guitar, while the more intense moments surround you with sinister, beat-heavy electronic music, with some sinister darkwave and even some balladry peppered in between. Every mood you'll experience is bolstered by the diversity, and overall the 28-song, 90-minute soundtrack is so good it’s worth streaming even when you're not journeying down the eponymous highway. And the best part, particularly for those with nostalgic feelings of being music fans in 1996, is that these songs are acquired by picking up collectible cassette tapes throughout the game. They’re well worth scouring the environment to find, and for making the trip so consistently pleasing to the ear, the many tunes of Road 96 combine to nab our 2021 Aggie for Best Music.
Runners-Up:
Life Is Strange: True Colors
The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles
The Artful Escape
Scarlet Hood and the Wicked Wood
Readers’ Choice: The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles
Courtrooms and crime scenes aren’t as inseparably linked to great soundtracks as road trips, but that didn’t stop Capcom from providing a wonderful musical accompaniment to the latest round of legal machinations in The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles. With this game taking place in the Victorian era, long before the time of Phoenix Wright, the instruments perfectly reflect the period and the vast array of moods experienced. The score ranges impressively from elegant strings to dramatic orchestral crescendos as the twisting, turning courtroom battles play out. When the action switches to London, the melody becomes suitably officious and overbearing, in stark contrast to the whimsically cheerful music accompanying ten-year-old Iris or the upbeat tune for journalist Raiten Menimemo, which sounds like a jauntier version of The X-Files theme. It’s all so diverse and brilliantly conducted that of course we have no objection to the game being named the reader winner for Best Music Aggie.
Runners-Up:
Life Is Strange: True Colors
Backbone
Strangeland
The Artful Escape
Next up: Best Acting (Voice or Live Action)... the envelope, please!
