I’ve been very excited to play Open Roads, despite its difficult journey to release. Announced at 2020’s TGAs, the game’s development began under the umbrella of Fullbright and was being created by the same team behind Gone Home, but team members left the company because of alleged toxic behaviour on the founder’s part. They later formed The Open Roads Team, and after several delays, released the game on March 28, just a week ago.
Critics Say Open Roads Never Really Got Going
Reception has been mixed, to say the least. At the time of writing, the game is sitting at 69 on Metacritic, a far cry from its predecessor Gone Home which has an 86. Digging into the mixed reviews reveals some common themes: reviewers disliked the lack of meaningful decision-making, felt there were serious pacing issues, noticed quite a few bugs, and felt that the story never resolves in a satisfying way. Others highlighted the repetitiveness of the gameplay, lack of puzzle complexity, and the almosttoosmooth relationship between the two main characters.
A lot of this criticism is valid. All of it is, really, since reviews are subjective experiences. I read through several before ever installing the game, because I was interested in seeing how I agreed and disagreed with whatever critical consensus there may be. Maybe it was because there was so much criticism of the story that I was so surprised to find myself close to tears at several points in the game. What I found so moving and intimate, others seemed to find lacklustre and slow. What gives?
I’ll be talking about the story here, so you should play the game before reading on. Don’t worry, it won’t take long – it’s a very short game.
In summary, here’s the plot: Tess and her mother Opal are packing up their house in preparation to move after the owner, Opal’s mother Helen, has died. As they do so, they come across a mystery – Helen seems to have had a romantic relationship with a man who isn’t her husband. Among this evidence is a key that Opal theorises might open something in her family’s old summer house. The pair embark on a brief road trip that takes them to the house, then all the way across the border to Canada.
A Mystery Left Unsolved
Despite the mystery at its centre, Open Roads portrays the mundane in beautiful, focused detail. By the end of the game, we find out that Helen wasn’t having an affair at all – it’s just that while Opal and her sister had been told their father had died suddenly of a heart attack, her father was actually on the run from police after he’d committed a series of burglaries. The letters we found throughout the game from this presumed lover were from Opal’s father, begging Helen to bring his family back to him.
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This is where the game ends – Opal decides she doesn’t want to keep pursuing her father, even though he might still be alive. What she knows is enough for her. While many reviewers felt that its final hour was when the game finally got going, I felt that stopping here suited the game perfectly. If Open Roads’ goal is indeed to portray the mundane, then it has done this successfully. Sometimes, big mysteries aren’t all that big or mysterious.
What happened to Tess and Opal isn’t outside of the realm of possibility, because every family has weird lore somewhere. And it’s entirely within reason that Opal wouldn’t want to keep digging, because she understands that there may be no joy in pursuing the complete truth. In real life, not every story has a tidy conclusion, resolving everything that happens in the journey there. That’s what Open Roads shows us.
We Don’t Always Get Closure
In fact, I think the game is trying to tell us something else entirely: every person is a mystery. What I found so moving about Open Roads was its detailed portrayal and description of characters through the artefacts they leave behind. Helen, in particular, was so clearly rendered it brought me to tears. Her working drafts of her advice column, her letters, and her pottery room made her feel like a whole person with her own secrets. Just because we aren’t privy to someone’s internal world doesn’t mean they don’t have one.
Very often, it’s hard to imagine what people are like outside of the ways we know them. When my grandmother died of cancer a few years ago, I began to write almost obsessively about her, trying to depict her as a whole person who had a life outside of her role as my grandmother. As I dug into my families’ memories of her, I learned more about her than I ever had when she’d been alive. Without making that effort to dig into her past, I never would have uncovered all this history about my own family.
There’s no resolution to the things I discovered – I can never ask her how she felt about the things that happened to her or the way people treated her, because she’s dead. It’s the same with Helen’s death – she was a woman with her own secrets, and Opal is left holding the weight of that revelation. Sometimes, that’s just what happens when people die. There’s no way around it.
Open Roads Isn’t Just A Story
I understand where other critics are coming from: they wanted more, to keep the momentum going, to watch the characters change meaningfully because of the journey. But the way Open Roads concluded seemed perfectly logical to me, because it’s a snapshot. It doesn’t tell us that people can change over a couple of days, or that a mystery can upend a family. Instead, it shows us the tiny details of what it looks like when a mother and daughter learn to understand each other better, how different people cope with hard feelings and situations, and how it can be better to let sleeping dogs lie.
At the same time, if you take it on its own terms, the intergenerational tale Open Roads spins is extremely compelling. Early in the game, Opal paraphrasesDeath Is Nothing At All, a poem she read at Helen’s funeral. It reminded me of the poem I read at my grandmother’s funeral,Louise Glück’s End of Winter. I have always read that poem as a tale of maternal sacrifice, the passing of one woman to enable the next to come into full strength. Maybe the open road isn’t the road trip, it’s the line from one woman to the next. It is about the unearthing of Helen’s secrets empowering Opal to understand her own childhood, allowing her to raise a teenage Tess under better circumstances. Everybody says Open Roads is too small, but it’s so much bigger than it seems.
Open Roads
WHERE TO PLAY
Mother and daughter Opal and Tess embark on a road trip together, a chance for them to improve their imperfect relationship. Effectively an interactive movie from Annapurna, Open Roads players make the decisions to determine which direction this story goes.
