Wheels of Aurelia

Plenty of games take place in cars. Very few are about the conversations that happen inside one. Wheels of Aurelia, from the Italian studio Santa Ragione (the small team behind the neon runner FOTONICA and the abstract space game MirrorMoon EP), bets everything on the second idea. It puts the player behind the wheel on the Via Aurelia in 1978 and cares much more about what gets said than how the car handles.

You play Lella, a restless woman heading north from Rome toward the French border. Beside her is Olga, a young woman she has only just met. Over roughly fifteen minutes the route follows the Tyrrhenian coast while Lella’s lines of dialogue are picked in real time. Those choices, and the turns taken at forks in the road, decide who gets in the car, who gets out, and where the trip ends. There are sixteen endings, each with its own epilogue.

The setting is the real selling point. Italy in 1978 was in the middle of the Years of Lead (anni di piombo): political bombings, kidnappings, and a country arguing bitterly about divorce, abortion and what a woman’s life was allowed to look like. Very few games touch this period, and fewer still do it from the passenger seat of a woman trying to leave her past behind. Santa Ragione deserves real credit for picking a subject that means something and treating it as a place people lived through, not as backdrop.

It’s a boutique title: short, paid ($14.99), made for replays, and aimed at people who already like Kentucky Route Zero, Firewatch or the shorter end of Telltale-style choice games. Its Metacritic score of 63 reflects that niche: a game built for a specific audience rather than a broad one.

• Real-time dialogue while you drive: Conversation options come up while you steer, and they don’t wait. Read, pick and drive all at once.
• Branching roads, branching stories: Turns at junctions change the route, the characters you meet and the ending. Geography works as a narrative choice.
• Sixteen endings in fifteen-minute runs: Each run is short enough to finish in one sitting, and each ending has a written epilogue for Lella and Olga.
• Grounded historical setting: The story draws on the real events of 1978 Italy, including terrorism, the divorce and abortion debates, and a changing view of women’s rights.
• Set-piece detours: Illegal street races, police chases, an argument with a Catholic priest, hitchhikers, and scenes where Lella’s troubled past catches up with her.
• Original period art and music: Work by Italian illustrators and a soundtrack of original songs in the style of 1970s Italian pop.
• One-handed controls: Built to be simple, which helps on mobile and makes it an accessible game for people who don’t usually play.

The Gameplay Loop

Each run follows the same pattern. The car starts in Rome and heads north, the road unrolling from an isometric, top-down view. Traffic comes and goes. Dialogue options appear in a strip, and there are usually only a few seconds to choose before the conversation moves on. At certain points the road forks, and taking the left or right lane is itself a choice, one that can send the run into a street race, a police roadblock, or a lay-by where a stranger is waiting for a lift.

A run takes about fifteen minutes, which is the right length for the design. With sixteen endings, most of the game is invisible on a single drive. The replay loop is where Wheels of Aurelia makes its case. A second run lets the player ask the question skipped the first time. A third opens the turn that was missed. By the fifth, the game becomes a map of possibilities, deliberately explored for unseen branches.

That structure is smart, and it’s the game’s best idea. It also hides the game’s biggest weakness.

The Driving Problem

The driving is barely a mechanic. Accelerate, move between lanes, avoid the odd car. Races come down to holding the throttle and making small corrections. Chases are tense for a moment and then just stop. There’s no handling model to learn, no skill ceiling, and almost nothing in the steering that changes the story except which exit is taken.

That wouldn’t matter if the driving were meant to be ambient, a visual rhythm to keep hands busy while the words do the real work. That seems to be the intent, and some of the time it works: the coast rolls by, the music plays, the mood of a long drive settles in. But the design also asks the player to read, choose and steer at the same time, and the three tasks get in each other’s way. Dialogue scrolls away while an oncoming truck fills the screen. A turn gets missed mid-sentence. A line gets picked in a hurry and produces a conversation nobody wanted. The design wants the pressure to feel like a real conversation in a moving car, but it often just feels like friction.

Writing and Theme

The writing carries the game, and it’s uneven. At its best it’s sharp and unexpectedly funny. Lella is prickly, evasive and interesting, and the exchanges with Olga have a nice tension to them: two strangers deciding in real time how much of themselves to give away. The conversations about divorce, abortion, the Church and political violence feel specific to their moment instead of like a history lesson, and a lot of the drama comes from how Lella answers questions she’d rather not answer.

The weaknesses come with the format. Fifteen minutes can’t hold much, and several threads, especially the ones about Lella’s past, feel rushed or thin on any single run. The full picture only emerges across several endings, and even then some of them land as a paragraph of text instead of a payoff. The hitchhikers and side characters are colourful but often gone before they matter. There’s also a rhythm problem: the dialogue sometimes jumps between topics abruptly, as if the branching system stitched together fragments that were written separately. The seams show.

A lot also depends on what the player brings to it. With even a little knowledge of Italy in the late 1970s, the references land hard. Without it, some of the political conversation passes by as mood instead of meaning. The game doesn’t explain much, which respects the player but narrows the audience.

Replay Value

Sixteen endings sounds like a lot, and they’re far enough apart to make replays worthwhile. The fixed route and the repeated opening, though, mean the game starts to feel like a checklist by roughly the fourth or fifth run. There’s no fast-forward to speak of, so the same early exchanges recur again and again. Tracking down every ending is satisfying for completionists. Everyone else will probably stop after two or three runs, having seen the shape of it.

This is where Santa Ragione’s art-school instincts pay off. The isometric road is clean and flat-shaded, with sun-bleached coastal towns, pale asphalt and a colour palette that looks like a faded postcard. The character portraits by Italian illustrators give Lella, Olga and the passengers a strong period look, closer to a 1970s magazine cover than a game UI. The overall aesthetic is consistent and confident, and it does a lot to sell the setting.

The soundtrack deserves its own mention. The original songs, written in the style of 1970s Italian pop, sound like they’re coming out of a car radio, and they give each run a warmth the thin driving can’t.

The UI is minimal and mostly readable, though dialogue text gets small on small screens, and the pace of the conversation strip is part of why reading while steering is hard. As a 2D game of this scope, it’s light on hardware by design, and nothing about it asks much of the platforms it’s on.

• Steam (PC): A monitor makes the dialogue easy to read, but PC is where the game is least comfortable. PC players tend to judge a game by its hours-per-dollar and depth of systems, and a fifteen-minute run with a vestigial driving model lands badly with them.
• Android: This is the game’s natural home. The one-handed controls make sense on a phone, a single run fits a commute or a coffee break, and the price softens the length complaint. The main drawback is text size: reading fast-moving dialogue on a small phone screen while steering makes the multitasking problem worse. A tablet is the better choice.
• Nintendo: Handheld play on Nintendo hardware sits in the middle. It has the pick-up-and-play feel of mobile and the physical controls of PC, which makes it a comfortable way to do several runs in a row on the couch. It’s a good fit for anyone who already has the hardware and likes short, story-first games.

Wheels of Aurelia is braver than it is polished. Santa Ragione picked a period almost no one in games will touch, gave it a memorable protagonist and a gorgeous sense of place, and built a smart replay structure around it. Those ambitions keep running into a driving layer that doesn’t pull its weight, and into a runtime too short to let its best threads grow. The lukewarm critical reception tells the same story: this game works best as a cheap-feeling, short, session-sized curiosity, and it struggles when judged as a full PC release at $14.99. On a phone or handheld, three runs in, there’s a thoughtful, unusual piece of interactive fiction here. Expect more than that and the road runs out fast.