Wheels of Aurelia Critic Reviews

Wheels of Aurelia is an interesting road game, more meaningful if you know the Italian history.

Wheels of Aurelia is an interesting experiment where the gameplay is not the core of the experience. The nice graphics, the soundtrack and the storytelling makes the latest game from Santa Ragione a compelling journey into the Italian history of the late Seventies.

Abortion, women's rights and the fight against fascism are just three of the various themes that conduct the player along Wheels of Aurelia, a proud "on the road" adventure that tells about a difficult moment of Italian history. The game is fun, but you must be prepared to live the same dialogues many times to discover all the 16 finals.

It's definitely a game those interested in storytelling have to try. Wheels of Aurelia has some shortcomings, but it's also a very unique and enjoyable ride.

Wheels of Aurelia is an interesting storytelling experiment. It tells the story of fictional characters in the Italian Seventies through a dialogue system with multiple answers. It lasts 20-30 minutes but it has 16 endings.

Lella’s journey is compelling, and the game itself is unlike anything we’ve seen before.

Wheels of Aurelia is best when it’s immersing you in the culture it came from, and when it offers you a scope of choice that seems as boundless as the roads you drive on. While it succeeds at that more often than not, the unexciting driving, the stilted and ill-fitting conversations, and the few paths it forces you to take end up taking me out of its fascination with roads not taken.

It's a shame the journey itself can't match the poignancy of the final destination.

All in all, the game feels like a tourist trap rather than a destination.

The original road trip is crippled with its half-baked design. Atmosphere of the time period is lovely, experience wrapped in it is rather annoying though.

When Wheels of Aurelia pretends to be a driving game, it’s an unwitting parody with awful collision detection. When it tries to be an adventure game, the choices it offers are too limited and shallow to be meaningful.

I love being exposed to new places and histories, but the distancing of Aurelia’s structure had me looking for a way to get closer; that brush with the familiar pulled me right in for a moment and I wanted more of the same.