My partner is half-Kiwi on their dad’s side, which is always fun for family gatherings because I get completely lost in the slang. What the hell is a sprog? I’ve never tried to get to grips with it, mainly because the city I live in - Newcastle - has enough slang of its own that I don’t understand. But along cameBroken Roads, a cRPG styled on the originalFalloutgames, set in a post-apocalyptic Australia. I fully expected to be lost all over again whenever someone started throwing out terms I’d never heard, but Drop Bear Bytes made an effort to keep everyone in the loop.
Don’t burn my house down and spam me with angry emails just yet. I know New Zealand and Australia are their own countries with their own unique slang, but there’s a lot of crossover. Hell, there’s crossover between the two and Britain. So, in learning some Australian slang, I’ve learned some New Zealand slang too. That’s because Broken Roads’ dialogue boxes highlight key terms that, when hovered over, display a definition. These terms are then added to your journal where you can check them at any time.
Sprog, as it turns out, means kid. I also learned what fair dinkum and yakka means. But it’s far more than just educational for lazy people who don’t Google things. Drop Bear Bytes could’ve smoothed out the dialogue and made it more approachable to a wider audience by gutting everything Australian about it, but that wouldn’t be in keeping with the game’s spirit.
Most apocalyptic games base themselves in America or Russia, but here we’re exploring the rustic ruins of Australian civilisation. It’s oddly homely as newfound settlements have begun to rebuild society over the graveyard of their predecessors, lifting ruins back up into almost Wild-West-like towns, keeping that Australian heritage alive. This was always a vital goal for the team.When I spoke to art director Kerstin Evans two years ago, they told me that they had taken over 1,000 photos as reference for creating each level. Sifting through its world now, I can feel the real country bleeding through the painterly art style.
You immediately feel yourself stepping into Australia as you begin your adventure in Broken Roads, but dialogue is as paramount to ensuring authenticity as design. By keeping the slang, the inhabitants feel tangible and the world lived in. It’s not just strings of exposition setting up plot points and continuing ongoing mysteries - like who the hell crashed that plane - but conversations that feel inherently natural, forging much stronger bonds with the cast.
Well, depending on your path. My first go at Broken Roads was a mixed bag because of severe bugs that resulted in the game being delayed, and because I chose to indulge in a nihilistic character. Much of the villainy felt immature, like a playground bully trying to act big rather than being a truly awful person. It never feels authentic, clashing with an otherwise meticulously handcrafted rendition of a country you can tell the developers cherish.
It’s part ofthe game’s morality system, a fresh approach to binary karma. Rather than having evil or good as your two leanings, you’ll find yourself stretched across a chart made up of Utilitarian, Nihilist, Machiavellian, and Humanist. The ways in which you handle situations are often uniquely tailored to which way your character leans, but within the very first hour of my evil run, the cracks started to show.
On the road, we ran into a widow mourning her recently killed husband. Her son, still holding the gun he used, was just off to the side. Tasked with defusing the situation, we walked over to him. I had already begun shaping my character into a Machiavellian Nihilist, so two options were presented to me. They were the exact same - shoot him in the chest. The Machiavellian did it because “He’s too much of a threat”, the Nihilist because “We don’t have time for this”. The complex system felt as binary as Fallout’s karma orMass Effect’s Renegade and Paragon, just under a new guise.
Eventually, I started over to try a heroic run. The dialogue now offered me different ways to defuse situations that didn’t amount to the same thing with varying degrees of snark, and the conversations felt far more mature. Under Utalitarian and Humanist, relationships were meaningful and the plights of our journey resonated. Every character we lost and every tragedy on the road tugged at a heartstring. It’s just a shame that such a big chunk of the morality system disappointed in execution.
Getting to step into Australia and feel the care pour out is wonderful, and I might finally understand at least some of what my partner’s dad is saying this Christmas. I’m not gonna whip out the slang and match him at his own game (that would go horribly wrong horribly fast), but it’s a breath of fresh air to step outside of the worlds games so often take us to and to be engulfed in a culture like Australia’s so effortlessly.
My time in Broken Roads was of course mired by game-breaking bugs that I’d be lying if I said didn’t sour me on the experience as a whole, but I’m eagerly awaiting the patches so I can uncover more of its world. It’s intricate, with such a care for the little things, and nothing sums that up like the attention to detail for its rich culture.
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