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Visual novels and exploration titles like Gone Home or Unpacking only succeed when they are able to convince the player to connect with their characters, and sadly Open Roads is a game that doesn’t do that. It relies heavily on a lo-fi aesthetic, but all that ambiance is surface level and doesn’t offer actual substance.
Much like Gone Home, Open Roads is a game that tasks its players with getting involved to get the most out of it. People begin in Tess Devine’s room in the middle of a major life change. She’s about to be out of school. Her grandmother Helen recently died. Her and her mother Opal are about to be out of the home they shared with Helen. Her parents are no longer together. Both Tess and Opal seem disconnected from each other and not exactly pleased about their prospects. However, as they are packing up, Tess finds evidence of a secret involving Helen’s love life, learns about abandoned summer home, and convinces her mom to take one last trip.
If that seems like a lot, it genuinely is. It all gets tossed at a person in the span of about fifteen minutes, depending on how quickly you choose to explore what was Helen, Opal, and Tess’ home. So much so that’d I’d say it is one of Open Roads’ major failings. There’s no time to really take in these revelations and ensure they count. Very little commentary typically appears from Tess and Opal, and the nature of their relationship means some responses can be more short or flippant rather than emotional. Not to mention rushing through things and learning important elements about characters, like that Tess’ father is gone, means there’s no impact to any of it.
All of this isn’t helped by the fact that Open Roads Team never gives its players a chance to really know who anyone is in this game. Visual novels can have thousands of words worth of exposition and dialogue that help you understand peoples’ personalities, relationships, and motivations. Gone Home offered a house filled with detailed notes, meaningful belongings, and set pieces that told a story without actually telling a story. Open Roads doesn’t do that.
When we’re heading to many of these locations, they’re often empty or in states of disarray. The things we might interact with, like erasers, board games, occasional books, or other knickknacks, are too generic to offer any real insight into their owners’ souls. (Meanwhile, Gone Home and Unpacking both made belongings feel meaningful as you’d happen upon them.) It almost felt like a joke whenever I’d have Tess find something, tell her to yell, “Mom” to find out what Opal had to say about it, and get one or two sentences that felt like meaningless asides as a response.
It got to the point that once the road trip proper began, I felt no motivation to actually explore anything. I wasn’t getting anything about of the flavorless text. Especially since Keri Russell and Kaitlyn Dever, two performers who are normally really great in their roles, don’t really feel like they embrace their roles. They both are fine here, but I was playing this while also going through a Japanese visual novel with actors really going all-in on their performances. The juxtaposition really made me feel like maybe they weren’t getting the direction or script they needed to really take advantage of the talent both bring to the table. The presentation isn’t great.
Speaking of which, I think I expected more from Open Roads based on its opening movie and early trailers. It almost seemed like we’d be getting a game where character portraits would be expressive and reacting to each situation. Instead, there are the same repeated animations for Tess and Opal. Sometimes, I even felt like the reactions of their portraits didn’t exactly match up with the moment. It is absolutely fine to go with static character portraits for visual novels. Some of my favorite ones do. But when we have a game that might only take you about an hour or two, depending on how much you explore, and has so few major story moments, I can’t help but feel like it needed that extra effort from its character designs.
I very much wanted to care about Open Roads, as it seemed like my “thing.” But there’s just so little to it, and it becomes near impossible to care about Tess, Opal, and their trip together as a result. People who often play visual novels will be let down by the narrative (or lack thereof). People who wanted this to be like Gone Home will despair in the fact that it isn’t fun to pick through these people’s things. It’s just a disappointment.
Open Roads is available for the Switch, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X, and PC.
