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The surprising phenomenon of indies casting Hollywood talent continues with Open Roads, a three-hour narrative adventure. But then this is the latest release from Annapurna Interactive, a publisher of both films and games, which has a few similarly voice-acted examples in its back catalogue – the delectable The Artful Escape and less-well-received 12 Minutes to name a couple.
Open Roads is the product of Open Roads Team, a studio made up of former Fullbright (Gone Home, Tacoma) employees. It began as a Fullbright project until allegations of toxic workplace behaviour led to the departure of creative lead and company co-founder Steve Gaynor; following delays, development eventually continued with much of the original team under the new name.
So, how does Open Roads hold up? Well enough, we’d say. If you’re a fan of the narrative-adventure genre – the first-person, limited interactivity of Edith Finch is an obvious parallel – you’ll be in your element playing through Open Roads. But if you want action then look elsewhere. Aside from the main gameplay push of ‘finding the next thing to progress the plot’, there’s not much else other than a smattering of dialogue choices, and even then the impact seems minimal.
So Open Roads is yet another of this increasingly large faction of worthwhile digital experiences where the word ‘game’ almost seems redundant, or in need of modification. Kerri Russell (Felicity, a very bad Star Wars film) and Kaitlyn Dever (Last of Us Season 2, a very good Booksmart) take on the roles of a mother and daughter, who, while packing up their recently deceased mum/grandmother’s house, stumble on a bunch of letters that hint at a shocking historical twist in their family. The urge for an explanation leads them on a road trip into Canada, and to a series of locations with links to this mysterious past.
Given the pedigree of the developers, it’s not surprising that the game’s storytelling is a massive strength. Even so, Open Road’s narrative ambition – which is a two-hander focusing on mum, Opal, and daughter, Tess – is intimate, and small-scale. There’s nothing too showy or attention-grabbing to proceedings. It was reassuring, then, that Open Roads immersed us in its game world almost immediately. It has some wonderful environmental storytelling, the bread-and-butter, step-one necessity of narrative adventures – the first area where they need to shine.
The opening scene puts us in the mind of Tess. She’s packing up her bedroom. In a first-person view, you have freedom to explore the room, pick up and examine objects, and to pack up as you go. Little hints at Tess’s personality come through that weaved into the bigger-picture story – most notably the library book about bootlegging where Tess’s name was the only borrower for the last three years.
When the characters speak to each other, they appear on screen via hand-drawn animations. It’s a graphical style that lured us in and charmed us. Although the game is only partially animated, what little is animated works. These semi-looped moments give a little extra humanity and life to the story, and helped us lose ourselves in the gentle twists and turns throughout.
The environments have a similarly powerful impact. Bedrooms, cellars, attics, motel rooms, and so on are rendered with loving attention to detail. All the objects within these areas – the TVs, the clutter – either add to the characterisation of Tess and Opal, or otherwise add to the worldbuilding.
This effort would have been for nothing if the writing and the performances were lacking. From the beginning, Open Roads’ characters felt real. Tess is a likable teenager, and her mother fulfils the role of troubled matriarch well. Their lives have been thrown into flux – problems related to housing, relationships, and damaging secrets linger at the edges of their conversations. The quality of the voice acting provides this tale all the subtle emotional variety that it needs. Techniques including parallel storylines help tie together the past and the ‘present’ (the game is set in 2003). Most importantly, the grandmother, Helen, whose life represents the bulk of Open Road’s mystery, is well-drawn and intriguing. She was an agony aunt, whose trials and tribulations were a delight to discover.
The few nitpicks we have with Open Roads, which include the repetitive nature of its gameplay, shouldn’t stop fans of the genre from driving off on this mum-daughter journey. But when realism is so paramount to the game’s appeal – the evocative visuals reminded us of our time at uni, especially the bulbous, overly colourful Apple Macs and plastic packing boxes – it was surprising that Tess’s movement was so cumbersome. She’s depicted as a sprightly teen, but she moves like a miserable, drunk 80-year-old. Her turning speed was so slow, that when we really thought about it and tried to imagine her, depicted in her animated, hand-drawn glory, moving like that around her room, or wherever else the story took us, the image looked absurd. We’d have loved the same attention to detail put into that side of things as there is elsewhere in Open Roads.
The game runs well on the Switch, except for a few very minor bugs where the character models jerked in once or twice as a dialogue began. This didn’t affect our enjoyment at all, however.
Conclusion
If you’re interested in a three-hour narrative adventure in the vein of Gone Home and Tacoma, and you can justify the current price, then there’s a memorable-enough time to be had with Open Roads. There’s not a wasted detail in the game’s storytelling and there’s a lot to appreciate in the subtle and skilful way it leads you through its tale. We enjoyed the little moments of character growth that came from Opal and Tess throughout. By the end, we felt as if we knew them. The game’s ending also, genuinely, surprised us, which is an impressive feat. There’s a heartfelt originality to Open Roads. But, yes, the gameplay is also limited. The ‘pick up an object, have a conversation’ repetition only has a temporary appeal. Whether the game is for you or not depends entirely on how you feel about the genre as a whole.