I approached Open Roads with a certain amount of skepticism, knowing only that it was a story-driven driving game with a bit of a mystery element. But the mystery is really just a backdrop—a vehicle to better emphasize the themes of family and secrets. Most notably, it’s about mother-daughter relationships, as we join single mom Opal and her 16-year-old daughter Tess on a brief (from our perspective) but bittersweet road trip, where, passing through Opal’s mother’s house after the funeral, they discover that she may have had an affair decades earlier. Can you really know the people you love? Does it matter? If you left your daughter’s early-2000s flip phone in a motel, would you turn around and waste four hours, or would you hope it would still be there on the way back?
Manage your cookie settings
Open Roads isn’t a long game, and it’s had some bumps in the road, but I’d say it’s come out of it in good shape. It has two really sturdy points, in particular. The first is the turnaround in Keri Russell and Kaitlyn Dever’s portrayals of Opal and Tess, respectively. Both are incredibly good actresses in the movies and TV shows you’ve seen, and since they’re the only two characters in the game you hear, Open Roads was always going to backfire on them in a large way. And it absolutely delivers, thank goodness. It’s a feat of empathetic and subtle writing, combined with performances that mean you get to see their relationship from both perspectives, even though you’re controlling Tess most of the time.
Tess is a glowing teenager who has fond memories of working at a video store with her father before he moved across the country to become a big-time businessman. She breaks the rules Opal imposes on her and earns enough money at her budding web design store that she a) feels she should be treated more like an adult; and b) buys her own plane ticket to visit her father, against Opal’s wishes. As a child of a divorced family whose father became a humorous parent, I understand what Tess means. And it breaks your heart to see that if you text your dad “I love you,” he won’t reciprocate. Now that I’m closer to Opal’s age, I can feel her frustration dripping off the screen at being left alone to care for her daughter and her mother. At the same time, part of Tess’s sympathy for her father comes from Opal’s refusal to be forthright about the circumstances of the divorce and too proud to ask for support now that she and Tess are running out of money.
This incredibly mundane yet terribly tense backdrop is compounded by the revelation that Opal’s mother, Helen – Tess’s grandmother – may have been having an affair around the time Opal’s father had a heart attack. Tess convinces her that they should go to the family’s ancient summer home (a run-down mobile home) to find out more, and from there they follow the trail all the way to Canada. I won’t spoil the mystery elements of the story, but it involves possible murder, lies, hidden identities, and general criminality – as well as loss and despair.
In some ways, it’s a parallel to what happened between Tess’s parents, and the way some of the clues are hinted at but never followed through are reminiscent of Gone Home . But Open Roads isn’t really about the mystery. As you wander through three different houses (and a motel room) in first-person, collecting things as you explore, it becomes about delicately sifting through love, change, and heartache that’s decades ancient but has been recorded in ancient letters and Polaroids. It’s not quite a visual novel, but it’s not quite a puzzle game. It’s the most fleeting of story-driven adventures, but adventure might be a sturdy word. And at the same time, as you hunt down forgotten things, you’re peeling back the elaborate layers that separate Opal and Tess.
Here we get to the other really sturdy point of Open Roads: the art style. The world you explore is 3D, leaning towards realism, which lends credibility to the objects you find—the last clay pot Helen made, the handwritten letters, the painted pebbles Opal and her sister collected as children. But Opal and Tess are 2D, hand-drawn works of art with minimal animation. It’s charming, but it also makes them seem much more emotional in context than if they were slightly angular 3D animated puppets, and it also gives a subtle sense that this is almost a play, with characters moving around the set. Open Roads really reminded me of a minimalist two-act play, with a pair of actors, a clever set, and a good script driving everything forward.
It’s the kind of game where, on the one hand, not much happens, and the game is surprisingly low (it clocks in at around two or three hours). But by the end, something changes between Tess and Opal in a way that allows you to imagine the story continuing. The real open roads were, ironically, the friends we made along the way.
This review is based on the version of the game provided by publisher Annapurna Interactive.
