Open Roads (2024)

Fixing your relationship with your mother in 400 words or less

After so many games about saving the world and fighting dragons, Open Roads is a perfect palate cleanser. This game manages to tell a very grounded story, with its main asset being connecting with the very human characters it presents. While it doesn’t manage to accomplish anything groundbreaking in terms of gameplay, it leaves you caring so much about the cast in such a short period of time.

The game is set in 2003, where you play as Tess, a teenager with a very teenage-y attitude. The game starts with Tess packing her bags from her grandmother’s house after she passes away. You help your mother, Opal, clear the entire house, as the bank is reclaiming it due to late mortgage payments. While cleaning the attic, you find a mysterious item from your grandmother’s past that kickstarts the story.

This mysterious item leads to a road trip between Tess and Opal. Now, this mother-daughter relationship isn’t perfect, as Tess’s teenage moods clash heavily with Opal’s responsible-adult personality. And to make things worse, Tess’s healthy relationship with her father, Opal’s ex-husband, is often a topic of contention.

The art-style blends explorable 3D environments with 2D portraits for the main characters during dialogue. The 2D animated portraits left me a bit underwhelmed; for a game with so few characters, I’m surprised they didn’t manage to create better 2D drawings of the main cast. It clashes heavily with the outstanding, emotional voice acting, one of Open Road’s biggest strengths.

Like many point-and-click games, you can inspect interactable objects in the world, though it lets you interact with more objects than necessary; there is no need to pick a rotate a small broom or three types of canned tomatoes. The environments you explore have a lot of attention to detail in terms of being set in 2003; an era of video rental places and flip phones managed to make me feel nostalgic.

Even with the problems I have with the gameplay and art-style, this game is absolutely worth playing only for the amazing story that tells and the very human character moments it produces between this mother-daughter duo. This is only enhanced by the stellar voice acting and Very Real conversations that makes you empathize with both sides. Open Roads made me care, not for a crazy story, but for how these two joked, argued, but ultimately bonded, during this journey.