Though Open Roads’ characters and attention to detail are lovely, the overall experience is lessened by its brevity and lack of depth.
Twitter: @awildjessichu on March 28, 2024 at 12:00PM PDT
I once read in a very profound article published in a very prestigious magazine (okay, it was a TikTok) that “daddy issues” make artists while “mommy issues” make writers. I can’t attest to the science–or lack thereof–behind this statement, but as a writer born into a long line of guarded women who wielded pens as weapons, I can absolutely relate.
As such, I have a particular fondness for mother-daughter stories and the catharsis they can offer. When I heard the team behind Gone Home would be tackling the subject in their upcoming game Open Roads, I braced for a beautiful cross-country journey that would inevitably hit too close to home. However, while Open Roads has moments of relatability that are powered by solid dialogue, charming characters, and nostalgia, I was ultimately left underwhelmed by the walk-and-click exploration game. With a runtime too short to truly pull players in and an abrupt ending that leaves things feeling hastily resolved, Open Roads feels more like a pit stop than an adventure.
That’s not to say the game’s premise isn’t interesting. Open Roads begins shortly after the death of the Devine family matriarch, Helen, and follows her daughter Opal and her granddaughter Tess as they cope with loss and what to do next. Throughout the entirety of the game, we play as Tess, a 16-year-old high school student who is every bit as strong-willed, cheeky, and hopeful as most 16-year-old girls are. On top of her grandmother’s death, Tess is also processing her parents’ recent separation and the loss of her home, as she and her mother lived with Helen but were not given the house upon her death.
While cleaning out her grandmother’s home, Tess and Opal stumble upon a suitcase buried within the attic walls and find what appears to be evidence of Helen’s secret life and a passionate love affair. With a week to go until the house is sold and an empty agenda, the pair set off on a series of short trips to get to the bottom of Helen’s mysterious life.
At each of the game’s handful of locations, you walk around as Tess and interact with objects from different time periods ranging primarily from the late ’60s to the early 2000s–the time the game is set in–that are sure to be familiar to many American millennials. Occasionally you’ll be able to pocket the items to use later, adding a slight puzzle element to what is otherwise a game driven by simple exploration, though these moments are few and far between. Certain items will also prompt you to call for your mom, who will chime in, add context, or mull over your findings with you. All this makes for straight-forward gameplay that can, unfortunately, start to feel a bit dull as the game goes on.
Outside of exploring the game’s dusty abodes and dimly lit motels, Tess spends most of her time riding shotgun in her mom’s late-’90s sedan. There, she’ll have the chance to cycle through mostly static-filled radio stations, chat with her mom, or use her trusty flip phone to text her father or best friend. Yet for a game titled Open Roads, your time spent on the road is extremely brief and only happens a handful of times, which ultimately takes away from the road-trip experience and doesn’t help to break up its repetitive gameplay.
This is a recurring issue, as the game in its entirety is too brief to effectively address everything it sets up or fully establish a deep sense of relatability and emotional connection. This is a shame considering the underlying plot is interesting and the game’s characters are very endearing. Though Kaitlyn Dever and Keri Russell might be known for their live-action careers, the pair bring a lot of personality to Tess and Opal respectively. Even Helen, who has no speaking parts and appears in the game only through grainy photographs, has a lot of personality. In fact, her vivaciousness is a frequent subject of discussion between Tess and Opal, who both exhibit her more free-spirited behavior, albeit in different ways. This is another aspect of the game I really enjoyed, as it’s all too often that mothers are written as protective, worrisome, uptight, and relatively flat–Open Roads avoids falling into that trap.
However, I also think Open Roads pivots a bit too far away from this mother-daughter tension. Sure, Tess and Opal do have their spats and Opal frequently expresses frustration towards some of her late mother’s actions, but for a pair going through grief, divorce, major life transitions, and betrayal, there’s a lack of drama that turns into a lack of evolution and catharsis. Between its overall brevity and hesitation to dig into messiness–humanness, even–Open Roads puts up a bit of a wall between the player and its story. As a result, I found I liked its characters, but I didn’t feel much towards them. While they were relatable enough, I didn’t find myself in them.
Sure, not all mother-daughter relationships are contentious or imitate Lady Bird, but in shying away from the emotional, you lose, well, emotions. For example, even with all the big plot points unraveling around them, the most impactful conversation in the game, to me, was the one Tess and Opal have after Tess accidentally leaves her phone at the hotel and demands they go back. As an adult, you’re able to see the situation rationally: It makes sense to finish up the drive and grab the phone on the way back–it’ll only be a night without it, after all. But Tess’s dialogue options are limited and a bit more intense than usual–she needs her phone. And despite being 30 years old, I still felt that desperation.
It’s clear that Open Roads wants to have meaningful conversations about generational trauma, the oft-dismissed complexity of mothers, and how humans have different ways of showing love, a fact that can lead to pain when misunderstood, and I wanted to have them too. Yet it doesn’t offer the time or vulnerability to dig into these interesting topics. And while some of its story beats are unique, or offer at least a slight variation on ones we’ve perhaps seen before, all of these stories end somewhat abruptly and without much fanfare or introspection.
Where the game truly shines in its narrative is via its environments. This is most likely due to the studio’s rich background in developing exploration games such as Gone Home and Tacoma, demonstrating an adeptness at crafting spaces that are nostalgic yet not overbearing, intriguing without being inundating, and immersive without being incoherent. Although I’ve realized that a number of first-person adventure games slightly unsettle my stomach (clearly a personal issue, and definitely not a fault of Open Roads), I thoroughly enjoyed immersing myself in the spaces crafted by the studio. There were countless items and pieces of furniture which took me back to my childhood, and it was fascinating to see the emotional impact these objects and the attached memories had on me, going even beyond that from many of the game’s dialogues.
In every location, there were small reminders of the times gone by – whether it was newspaper cutouts, a Blockbuster DVD of Clueless, or a casserole dish reminiscent of CorningWare – contributing to a sense of passage of time. This feeling was surely heightened by some of Tess and Opal’s discussions – one of my favorites was when Tess confesses to her technologically-challenged mother about her wild Friday nights, involving pizza rolls and playing The Sims, as I could very much relate. As much as the dialogues were great, an equal amount of credit goes to the artistic magnificence and intricate detailing that brought these locations to life.
Another aspect of Open Roads that I loved was the character art, which seemed to have drawn inspiration from the animated movies that were part of my 90’s childhood. The style provided a stark contrast against the notably realistic settings and was very well complemented by the voice acting in the game, though there were moments where the absence of proper lip-syncing felt slightly odd. More unsettling, however, was the game’s sound, which seemed almost fractured. I had anticipated hearing music and sounds that would throw me back to the year 2003, but they were strikingly missing. Even though I wasn’t expecting “Stacy’s Mom” or “Hey Ya!” to start playing on the radio, having multiple radios and TVs that could be turned on but did effectively nothing felt somewhat disappointing.
The fact that “disappointing” and “underwhelming” came up several times during my experience with Open Roads is regrettable, given there are numerous noteworthy elements in the game. The overarching storyline deals with some profound themes, has a reasonable amount of intrigue, a healthy dose of well-executed dialogues, an interesting range of characters, and an abundance of emotional depth. Nevertheless, many elements feel short of the mark or abruptly truncated, making the overall experience a tad uninspiring. Regardless of being a game about a mother-daughter road trip, the story doesn’t venture far, and the mother-daughter relationship just undergoes a subtle shift instead of a deep, meaningful transformation.
