Open Roads review – Brief and a bit bumpy

Announced back in 2000, narrative adventure Open Roads is finally here from developers Open Roads Team and publisher Annapurna Interactive. The mother-daughter road trip tale has had quite an eventful journey to reach its destination on PC and consoles. But even without knowing the behind-the-scenes drama, the few hours playing this brief title give the impression that the released game hasn’t achieved its full potential.

Featuring a combination of 2D character models, and 3D environments explorable in the first person, Open Roads kicks off in 2003 with 16-year-old Tess Devine (voiced by Booksmart and No One With Help You’s Kaitlyn Dever) packing up her belongings as she and her single mother Opal (Keri Russell from The Americans, Felicity and Star Wars: Rise of Skywalker) prepare to leave the family home. The pair were living with Opal’s mother, Helen, caring for the older woman as she succumbed to dementia. Now that Helen has passed, the house has been sold to cover her debts.

As Tess and Opal face an uncertain future, they stumble upon a key and postcard hidden among Helen’s possessions. These items open the door to a family mystery, which will send the pair far from home, provide a welcome distraction from their problems, and alter their already uneasy dynamic.

The good first: Open Roads is incredibly well-acted and scripted in terms of dialogue. While casting Hollywood stars for video game and animation projects is attention-grabbing, these famous faces don’t always make strong vocal performers, coming across as stiff and detached instead. Dever and Russell are always convincing though, with Dever’s Tess spunky without being obnoxious, and Russell’s Opal oozing repressed emotional complexity. All three generations of women in Open Roads have their secrets, and in Opal’s case the burden has led her to double down on an isolating belief that people will always disappoint.

Buoyed by its naturalistic performances and writing, Open Roads is at its most powerful when it accelerates with YOLO energy into emotionally thorny territory, where painful truths are finally vocalised. On that note, Open Roads is welcome as a rare opportunity to see a mother-daughter dynamic explored in a video game – when traditionally it’s fatherhood-centred titles that have hogged the limelight.

The big issue with Open Roads is that as the credits roll, you’re left with a strong feeling of “Is that it?” Even with a leisurely playthrough, where you pick up and examine every dirty plate and beer bottle in the game, the journey is over in two-and-a-half hours maximum.

Open Roads suffers from a similar problem to fellow exploratory adventure Firewatch in that the set-up and escalation of core mystery just do not match the pay off. The big revelation isn’t much of a surprise if you’ve been paying attention. Then again, Open Roads seems less focused on deciphering enigmas and more about delving into complex familial feelings and emotional catharsis. The latter it does very effectively, to be fair.

Open Roads feels a little half-baked, and that sense is amplified by the animation approach. There’s no faulting the immersiveness of the derelict settings you investigate, but the character models – done in the hand-drawn retro style of Don Bluth and Disney pre the studio’s late 80s resurgence – are extremely limited. The game cycles constantly between Tess and Opal in happy, disappointed, cheeky and angry states, and the lip sync typically cuts off long before the voice-over. It’s possible to get used to this, but at the same time if you know the drama inherent to the game’s making – resignations, indefinite delays and an eventual break away from the Fullbright label due to the toxic behaviour of studio co-founder Steve Gaynor – you have to wonder if concessions were made to simply get Open Roads done.

If you’re in the mood for a short little gaming getaway, with strong interactive movie vibes, Open Roads is an outing worth taking. But it’s far from deserving of a spot in your gaming vacation photo album.

Released on 28 March, Open Roads is out now for PC (through Steam), Xbox One and Series consoles, PlayStation 4 and 5, and Nintendo Switch. It’s also part of the Xbox Game Pass and PC Game Pass catalogue.