There are times when Open Roads hits alarmingly close to home. Early on in this interactive road trip, your 16-year-old protagonist Tess turns around to reach for a bag perched in the back of her mom’s vintage station wagon – without skipping a beat, she’s accosted by her mother, Opal, from behind the wheel. The altercation flooded my brain with memories of family road trips in the early 2000s: “You can’t just turn around. It’s unsafe,” my dad would say from his vehicular throne, despite how frustratingly close I was to grabbing my Game Boy. Parental authority and nostalgia are just a few of the powerful tools Open Roads harnesses to deliver a playful and relatable story about coming of age in the early aughts, however, hastily resolved problems and the lack of an engaging mystery also make this adventure a little too predictable to leave a lasting impression.
Set in the wake of her grandmother’s passing, Tess and her mother are forced to navigate grief and economic uncertainty as they cope with the breakdown of their nuclear family. Tess’s father is distant, in touch via text alone, while her mother maintains a tough exterior for her daughter’s sake. Stuck in the middle, Tess’s optimistic outlook shines through but hides a trove of complex emotions. Open Roads’ exceptional Hollywood leads, Keri Russell and Kaitlyn Dever, amplify their uncomfortably raw exchanges – Russell’s Opal is believably guarded but capable of arresting warmth, whereas Dever’s Tess balances youthful naivete with spirited angst. Tonal subtext abounds as emotions run high, and I felt connected to these characters as early as the opening back-and-forth.
Open Roads’ art style leaves a lasting first impression as well. Hand-drawn 2D characters are layered on top of meticulously detailed 3D environments, giving this world a unique, dreamlike quality. Imperfections augment scribbled notes, juxtaposing them against the angular digital backdrop – and I couldn’t help but inspect the scratches and flecks of dust on a chunky iMac lookalike I came across at one point. While this trip is mostly isolating by design, the touches of life, like soot particles and trees swaying in the wind, make you feel more at peace in the solitude.
In the process of sorting through her late grandmother’s belongings, Tess uncovers a curious briefcase of relics, complete with a cryptic postcard from an unknown sender beckoning her grandma to join them. Keen to escape the immediate burdens of loss, Tess convinces a reluctant Opal to cross the country and unravel a generational family mystery. Melancholic but strangely engrossing, Open Roads almost entirely consists of rummaging through dioramas lost to time. From derelict summer houses to musty hotel rooms, each new location contains sprinklings of forgotten belongings to interact with alongside precious tidbits of environmental storytelling I relished in examining with a fine-tooth comb. An admittedly repetitive process, standout items like charming childhood drawings that mask coping mechanisms with superheroes and classic rented DVDs managed to keep me on the hook while effectively time-stamping each hazy era they were from.
A light smattering of systems allow you to engage your inner holistic detective to piece together the past – but don’t expect deep puzzles or critical thinking. Across its roughly three-and-a-half-hour run time, Open Roads didn’t get more complicated than finding an odd opening to another room or searching out a partially hidden letter. The more you scour, the more you’ll confront Open Roads’ past-meets-present storytelling that revolves around Opal’s own childhood traumas, which are finding new life in the issues now plaguing her daughter. Like phantom wounds passed down through the generations, their happy-go-lucky veneer masks troubling truths that are, for the most part, intriguing to unfurl.
Interacting with items can prompt Tess’s inner monologue and offer a window into her developing psyche, while plot-forwarding objects trigger eye-opening conversations with her mother. Seeking out as many of these touchy scenes as possible helped ground me in Open Roads story and compelled me to tinker with all the toys I could find in search of more emotive exposition. Unfortunately, such loaded artifacts were few and far between, but the conversations surrounding them felt sincere and created a nervous atmosphere that kept me guessing as the family’s secrets started to surface.
Environmental inspections are spliced between highway drives where Tess and Opal process the latest day while coasting to the next spot. Where static locations focus on Opal’s murky upbringing and faulty memory, the car conversations center around Tess’s present issues with her mom. Initially, the mysterious man’s letters and postcards appear to be the hook, but the persistent interpersonal turmoil is by far Open Roads’ defining asset.
It was disappointing then that as the player-come-passenger in this journey, I began to feel like a ghost in the machine, privy to all the surrounding context but unable to engage with it meaningfully. Even though I could radio surf, flick door locks, and text as the autumnal foliage passed me by, I felt distant from Tess as the story soldiered on. Despite the amount of time I’d spent in her head, Tess’s actions felt unusually measured for a teenager dealing with such traumatic events. I often wished that Open Roads would stop pulling its punches until, surprisingly quickly, the credits rolled. A few breezy puzzles offered fleeting resistance, but the twists and turns of the story didn’t provoke the emotion I expected when they finally arrived. The pieces of this quilt never quite stitched together for me.
This feeling is most frustrating when you’re offered options in dialogue. I was often keen to chase certain plot threads, but my choices always tended to lead to the same place, and the inconsequentiality of what I thought was important subtext became disheartening when I realized this in my second playthrough. The investigative spirit in its early-game explorations was never nurtured during Open Road’s conversations. Heavy discussions about mental health felt like an opportunity to level the playing field between Tess and her mother, but such moments aren’t allowed to breathe in a believable way. A safe and disappointing climax only confirmed my fears, providing an easy answer that felt like a messily applied band-aid over a far more complex wound. I was left longing for more of the ugly, believable humanity we all partake in, but Open Roads decidedly orbits.
