The language barrier is just one of the obstacles that players will face in Broken Roads, a postapocalyptic role-playing game filled with thorny moral choices. With a distinctive nasal twang, the locals pepper their conversations with “crikey,” “sprog,” “yobbo,” “tinny,” “chunder,” “togs” and “hard yakka.” Early in the game, a cocky mercenary is called “a legend in his own lunchbox.”
Some of the terms are defined with an in-game glossary feature, but others need to be puzzled out via context. In other words: Have a go, yer mug.
Broken Roads, which was inspired by the “Mad Max” films as well as the dystopian Fallout games, follows an arduous journey from Brookton to Kalgoorlie in the Wheatbelt region of Western Australia. Yes, you can stop off at the pub on the way.
The team at Drop Bear Bytes worked hard to ensure that every aspect of the game conveys an authentic vision of the country, whether it was duplicating the distinctive reddish hue of outback soil or developing specialized technology that makes the ruffling of emu feathers feel true to life.
In Broken Roads, which releases on Wednesday for the PC and the PlayStation and Xbox consoles, the player leads a motley crew through a richly detailed, morally complex world. Through dialogue and action, the player is frequently forced to make choices — labeled humanist, utilitarian, Machiavellian or nihilist — that profoundly alter the way the story unfolds.
The game takes place about 150 years into the future, in the wasted ruins of a nuclear war. Some have joked that its vision of postapocalyptic Australia — a strange, forbidding landscape filled with bizarre-looking creatures and vegetation — bears an uncanny resemblance to parts of actual modern-day Australia.
“It’s this arid, inhospitable place that people still manage to live in,” Leanne Taylor-Giles, the game’s narrative lead, said of the Wheatbelt region, a vast tract of agricultural land that partly surrounds Perth. “And it’s extraordinarily beautiful.”
A 2022 research trip through the Wheatbelt allowed a few members of the team to observe aspects of the Australian persona — a working-class hardiness and humor — that Taylor-Giles sought to bring out in the characters in the game.
“I tried to capture the spirit of the people who live in those towns,” said Taylor-Giles, who lives in Queensland in eastern Australia. She added, “That sense of making do with the things they have, of coming together to make it against all odds, is something that I really love.”
While driving the route eventually replicated in Broken Roads, the Drop Bear Bytes team took thousands of reference photographs — many in-game locations are eerily faithful recreations of real places — and recorded some of the ambient audio that made it into the game’s soundscape.
“When you’re standing in Wave Rock” in Broken Roads, “you are literally hearing all the wildlife ambience and wind of Wave Rock,” said Tim Sunderland, the audio lead who also composed the didgeridoo-infused score.
Some aspects of the game verge on self-lampoonery, a very Aussie tendency. A cricket bat, festooned with saw blades, is wielded as a weapon; specially concocted craft beers work like magic potions.
Serious thought and care, though, went into the treatment and representation of Indigenous Australians. Since the game takes place on land traditionally owned by the Noongar people, the team worked with Karla Hart, a Noongar writer who signed on as a consultant.
Hart advised on parts of the game that allow the player to learn about Noongar culture and customs, including traditional foods and medicine.
“One of the Noongar characters works with fire,” Taylor-Giles said. “After some discussion with Karla, it turned out that the Noongar idea of fire is as a warming, benevolent presence, equated with safety, or home — very different from my own relationship with fire.”
The player will also encounter authentic Indigenous artwork, commissioned specially for the game. And in keeping with the linguistic element of Broken Roads, there are many Noongar words to learn. In this case, the words need to be heard a number of times before the game provides a definition.
“I hope gamers go away with a small experience of who we are as a people or something that they can identify with,” Hart said.
In addition to its Australian team, Drop Bear Bytes also has members in the United States, Britain, Spain and South Africa.
“You can call us honorary Aussies,” said Bianca Roux, a 3-D modeler, sculptor and texture artist based in Cape Town. When not sculpting the game’s kangaroos, wallabies and koalas, she has been bingeing episodes of the reality series “Outback Opal Hunters.”
Taylor-Giles is excited about sharing the Broken Roads vision of Australia with the rest of the world, but she is just as keen for Australian gamers to become acquainted with a less familiar part of their own country.
“We may come to appreciate what’s exceptional about ourselves,” she said. “The things that easily fade into the background when we live them, day in and day out.”
