Concept wise it's fine, a mother-daughter bonding experience through the means of picking up objects and talking as is the tradition in many walking sim. The problem is that the characters are too ordinary and the style of the game wasn't enough to hold up the mundane slice of life drama for more than a few hours. The 2D art for the characters is certainly an interesting choice, and piqued my interest for the novelty factor alone but that got old quickly and I was left with a few recycled animations looping in every conversations. I wanted to like it but I just wasn't invested enough to keep playing.

Open Roads is a fairly mid-tier experience within the Walking Sim genre. Although, given the size of the genre and that its one I'm a fan of, that means I still had a fun ride with Open Roads.

The 2D character art alongside the highly detailed 3D environments was a welcome change from its peers. The characters being given few frames that are exaggerated is a cool style, thought I found the lack of frames during speech a bit jarring. The voice performances on the other hand are great and helped patch that hole. Kaitlyn Dever in particular is phenomenal and brings so much life and youthfulness to Tess.

The primary mystery of the story is... okay. It functioned better as the carrot on the stick rather than being a mind shattering plot twist with the final reveals. Instead the story bits I found more engaging were the little details and sub-conversations. Themes of divorce, loss of loved ones, growing up with only one parent, cycles within families. There is surprisingly a lot packed into the short run time, thinking back on the experience once its done.

Overall I can't call this a must play relative to the other Walking Sims but while this can be a tropey genre in its themes, settings and even specific plot details, I think Open Roads takes the road less travelled and explores some new ideas.

From what I've seen, this game experienced a rocky development, but I am left excited to see what this team does next. Hopefully its a smoother ride where the potential for an even greater game is just a ways down the road.

I'm sorry, ex Fullbright, but this game missed the mark for me. It's the first game from the studio that I can't say I enjoyed.

The premise of a mother-daughter road trip to uncover a hidden family secret was very intriguing to me and fits perfectly with Fullbright's style of storytelling through letters and environmental cues. With the back-and-forth between the two characters, some of the magic of discovering things for yourself is lost. About 80% of their conversations are just exposition dumps. While the voice acting is great and there's chemistry between Tess and Opal, some of the dialogue just doesn't feel right and is honestly sometimes even poorly written.

The flute ambient soundtrack is annoyingly lifeless and lacks emotion. They even missed playing the essential radio songs during the car rides, which is a must-have for a road trip experience, why not add some nice early 2000 indie track? totally missed opportunity there.

The 2D character design against 3D backgrounds kind of works, but the lack of animations during dialogue is very noticeable. As Dusk Falls handled this much better, where scenes naturally flowed into one another. Here, it's just a monotonous sequence of the same three animations that sometimes don't even match what the character is saying or feeling.

Story-wise, it's somewhat okay. I see what they're trying to tell, and the message isn't lost; it subtly develops into something substantial by the end, and I could connect with it to some extent. It's even more frustrating because there seems to be a great script, but everything around it just feels off. I sincerely hope they get another chance to make a game without the development turmoil, as I really appreciate the way they use this medium.

Not quite as remarkable as Gone Home, but very similar and definitely recommended if you like the sort of game that does storytelling through finding personal artifacts while exploring domestic environments. The central mother-child relationship is relatable but not trope-y, and the uncovered family mystery has some genuine surprises that feel well-earned and believable.

I don’t know how likely a sequel is given this game’s rocky development, but I’d love one that included the aunt more, too. Her childhood Nightshade subplot was unexpectedly memorable.

One nagging complaint is I hated the amateurish implementation of camera lock-on for interactive objects. Just pop up the object name to let me know it’s there! I don’t need camera control wrested away, and it’s especially a nightmare when several small objects are close together.

Open Roads teve um desenvolvimento conturbado devido à saída do diretor do projeto a meio do mesmo por ter sido revelado que este criava um mau ambiente de trabalho, principalmente para mulheres. Após a sua saída, os desenvolvedores colocaram mãos à obra e tentaram finalizar o projeto. O resultado foi um jogo que revela imenso potencial ao início, mas que depois se perde um pouco por conta da jogabilidade e dos vários bugs, queda de frames e vários outros problemas técnicos.

A narrativa em si é interessante e intrigante, mas nota-se que sofreu alterações durante o desenvolvimento, tornando-se um pouco confusa pelo meio. Há demasiadas revelações num curto espaço de tempo e a história sofre com isso. A jogabilidade é muito baseada em analisar objetos e cenários em busca de respostas e isso funciona muito bem em jogos deste género, mas em Open Roads todos, ou quase todos, os objetos permitem interação, tornando difícil perceber quais afinal são importantes e quais não são - sim, isto sou eu revoltado por passar metade da gameplay a analisar ao pormenor latas de feijão, baldes e revistas aleatórias a achar que teriam algum segredo escondido, quando na verdade nada acrescentavam.

A tradução para português parece ter sido feita por alguma ferramenta informática e não por tradutores a sério, o que é uma pena, já que tira ainda mais sentido ao jogo.

No entanto, nem tudo é mau em Open Roads - os visuais são criativos, a narrativa, apesar de estar longe de perfeita, apresenta pontos interessantes e é uma experiência bastante acolhedora no geral.

Com a sua duração, é uma boa forma de passar uma tarde, mas deixa a desejar com os seus problemas e com uma história que precisava de um pouquinho mais.

A visual novel that follows a teenage girl and her mother on an adventure to discover their family's secrets after the passing of the grandmother. The story is told via the items and letters that you, Tess, pick up and discuss with your mother, Opal. It's a funny story of growth and understanding between a daughter and her mother.

The game looks really nice and the VA work from Keri Russell and Kaitlyn Dever was well done and made connecting to the family easy. The 2002 set piece reminded me a lot of my childhood homes as I recognized items that I would see in my own home or my family's growing up.

There are issues where the controls (Series X) would get jammed when looking around, or even jerk my view in a direction I wasn't moving to but overall the walking and interaction selections worked fine.

There is some replayability with the dialogue options you can choose from, but the full story can be told in one sitting. I gained all achievements as well.

It's worth playing once for the story. Annapurna makes some of my favorite titles.

Game #141: Open Roads

A short and sweet game that you can use to take a small break from all these long titles. It's nothing groundbreaking or unique but still a fun experience.

5/10

Eh... it’s quite sad and hard to be slightly disappointed in the new work of a team whose work you’ve been following for a long time. Open Roads from the team of the same name (from the former core of Fullbright studio) can hardly be called the next step for the creators of Gone Home and Tacoma, rather a child of its difficult development cycle. And it's really sad.

Well, the story is not bad. It brings you back to Gone Home in the way the game turns a slightly mystical premise into a down-to-earth, everyday ending, which is generally done quite well, but also quite simply. The game perhaps feels too short, and the choice of road trip structure, while fresh, seems to come at the expense of the excellent environmental storytelling skills that the team's previous projects have been known for. There simply aren't large enough locations to develop this skill beyond a very basic level of interaction, and the game as a whole struck me as disappointingly less interactive and detailed than previous works (only in the summer house segment does the story get an acceptably large location and path within it and layout plot-significant objects has at least a little more interesting thought behind the most basic level). However, the two main performances are not bad, the variety of dialogue between the heroines is pleasing (and there even seems to be some choice), and although the story itself does not feel too deep, the good chemistry between the characters lifts this aspect a little.

And at the same time, the hardest thing for me is to formulate my thoughts about a rather important and interesting decision in the visual aspect of the game. Despite (as before for the team) a rather realistic environment, this time the characters are drawn in a 2D style that seems to correspond to comics or animation of the era (and besides this, even in the environment there is a certain touch of “drawnness” that departs from realism (which, however, is not a bad thing at all and allows you to create beautiful background landscapes, especially in the segment with a summer house it is incredibly beautiful)). And if at first it looked rather repulsive and incongruous, then towards the end I came to terms with this stylistic decision a little. I just don't understand why they didn't use the characters themselves somewhere other than dialogue (where they look most unnatural), since in the scene in the car the mother looks pretty good while driving. Well, the characters themselves are drawn quite simply and without any attempt to synchronize speech with their faces, here they simply give out one of a small number of emotions and then seeing a static character while the dialogue is going on is quite sad. What's also sad is the technical part of the game. There is nothing critical here, but a few small moments that obviously could be seen in the very basic playtest (mainly with the mechanics of picking up items) slightly spoil the overall impression (considering that this is a very mechanically simple game and it is very difficult to break anything here). However, it's hard to criticize the game too much for this given its notoriously difficult production history.

So overall, I’m just a little sad that this project is more of a victim of circumstances and in no way a development for this team. I hope that these people will be able to create something more exciting in the future, perhaps separately and in new teams. Because it seems that Open Roads is a thing that needed to be finished and left behind, just as the heroines of this game actually do in their story.

Open Roads se hace más incomprensible cuando, después de jugarlo, se revisitan algunos de sus tráilers iniciales, allá por 2020.

En algún momento el desarrollo descarriló estrepitosamente dejando en el lugar del accidente un juego extraño e incoherente, muy de boquiqui, donde todo lo que parece querer construir se va por el sumidero una y otra y otra vez.

Tambiés es extraño, ya digo, porque artísticamente es un juego muy confuso, narrativamente cuestionable y con unas pretensiones que, quiero pensar, no supimos ver o entender.

No es problema mío, en cualquier caso, y quizá nunca sepamos cómo de importante fue el post Gone Home y Tacoma, pero yo sigo preguntándome quién pedía esto aquí y ahora y, sobre todo, ¿dónde están las open roads?