A Safe Route

Dealing with the loss of a family member is never easy, especially when you’re in your teenage years, the world is still so new, and foundational pieces are still to be set in place.  It brings families together in part for a celebration of life, but also a time to reminiscence on past memories and relive those enjoyable moments.  For Tess Devine and her mother, Opal, the journey weaved together through this reminiscing will shape their futures forever.  But first, we gotta clean this room up.

After an estate sale that ridded the family with most of their grandmother Helen’s belongings, Tess and her mother are finalizing a reluctant push out of their home due to Helen’s three mortgages on one house.  Once done packing her room, Tess and Opal search the remaining rooms for any leftover belongings before leaving the house for good.  A search of the attic finds a secret compartment with a letter addressed to Helen from a man they’ve never heard of before, speaking of abandoning her family and running away to an unknown area.  Unsure of how to tackle this information and yearning to find the truth, Tess and Opal travel to forgotten relics of Opal’s past and beyond to discover the mystery Helen never wanted solved.

Open Roads is a walking simulator with light puzzle elements created by the team behind Gone Home, but not under the Fullbright name amid some tumultuous news regarding the development of the title and the game company as a whole.  The game mainly focuses on combing rooms and other areas for specific items that will provide conversation between the two main characters, Tess and Opal.  Set in the waning Summer days of 2003, Tess’s upstart business of designing websites for an adolescent World Wide Web has her prepping a portfolio for Silicon Valley with AIM conversations in tow. Meanwhile Opal seeks to shelter her only daughter from a rapidly deteriorating family that is spread across the country: Opal’s sister, Autumn, resides in Chicago and her gambling ex-husband looks to make it big in Nevada.  These fractures of past lives let in the air of doubt and regret amongst Tess and Opal’s conversations, brought together beautifully by the voice actors Keri Russell and Kaitlyn Dever.

Having these two AAA talents provide the optimistic yet apprehensive feelings of Tess combating the grounded and battle-hardened demeanor of Opal really brings your attention to every word spoken.  Each character laying their hopes, dreams, wants, desires, expectations, frustrations, and everything else in between grounds the whole experience and does a beautiful job immersing you within their struggles and successes.  I do wish there was a little better direction within each voice line merging together as some scenes feel very stiff, with lines not quite flowing into each other.  These feel less like conversations and more like a script read and it can be distracting at multiple points of the game.

The areas and backgrounds in Open Roads will not astonish but are perfectly serviceable.  The bread and butter are the gorgeous hand-drawn characters during conversations and interjections during detail-searching on picked up items.  These really stand out and are such a delight to look at, especially with the animations for Tess and Opal.  You can really feel the emotion coming through their lines and expressions that combine together for a beautifully done package.  The animations for character expressions are short and minimal, so while they are a nice treat to see, their repetition can sully some of the intended drama and it’s telling how quickly this happens in a 2-3hr story.

I wish that the circumstances surrounding the development of Open Roads didn’t overshadow the title, but I feel like the turmoil and churn through their team decidedly did not do the game any favors in where it misfires. That said, I will always fight for games like these because it scratches that itch that AAA games never can: small teams telling stories that they want to make because they want to, not just because it will make millions of dollars.  Open Roads is not perfect by any means, but it’s a serviceable short story that never overstays its welcome, and provides a consistently even cook for its players ready to chew another solid piece of indie.

7/10