Open Roads Reviews
The game is a snapshot of the lives of three women, uncovered over the course of a few days, the discoveries they make about each other, and how the whole experience brings them closer together. And like most people’s lives, it’s not all action, dungeon crawling, and loot collecting. It’s mainly emotions, arguments, secrets, heartache, and love; in other words, what the game has to offer simply won’t seem very interesting to everybody. But for anybody looking to spend a relaxing afternoon with a heartwarming tale, taking a brief road trip with Tess and Opal in Open Roads may be just the answer.
A gentle adventure into a family's secrets that's nicely crafted but over before it really begins.
Pleasant but rarely compelling characters undermine this spiritual sequel to Gone Home.
An earnest exploration of a family in turmoil, Open Roads has sharp teeth but ultimately lacks bite.
Open Roads' mother-daughter travelog about discovering long-buried family secrets is heartfelt, but this lightweight driving adventure doesn't reach the momentum of the mystery it so carefully maps out.
With a brief runtime of a couple of hours, Open Roads is a respectable tale that sometimes feels ready to hit that higher narrative gear before easing off the gas again. Although visually pleasing and well-acted, the emotional impact is muted. While I didn’t mind sitting shotgun as Opal and Tess had lighthearted debates over the semantics of trailer vs. mobile homes and reminisced about old flames, it’s not a road trip that will stick with me for the long haul.
You'll have a lot of stuff to pick up at each of these locations, but the most important items will often provide a "Hey mom!" option, which lets Tess call Opal over. Opal's role in these situations is to provide context about her childhood, how she experienced the past, and what these items (and the secrets that come with them) do to color those memories. They're all essential conversations related to the big, overarching mystery, but they sometimes feel stilted; the "Hey mom!" button gets repetitive, making all the potential sincerity feel cheapened.
Though Open Roads' characters and attention to detail are lovely, the overall experience is lessened by its brevity and lack of depth.
Open Roads has no metaphorical light switches and doesn’t allow for so much player freedom or personal expression. With such a strong duo as Tess and Opal leading the game, Open Roads may have been better served as a straight visual novel. But the focus on them also makes picking up objects to unravel the mystery feel lacking. This is a story for the player to witness, not unravel through interaction themselves.
Open Roads is a touching love letter to grief, the breaking of generational cycles and the complexities of family relationships. Dever and Russell’s performances are at once invigorating and heart-wrenching, demonstrating a genuine passion for acting throughout the game. The interactive environment feels lived-in and authentic to the early 2000s, adding another layer of immersion to the player's experience. While the voice acting is impressive, the characters’ appearance and facial movements become repetitive around the thirty-minute mark, diminishing some of the emotional beats in the story. Overall, Open Roads is a must-play poignant experience for fans of visual novels.
Open Roads is a well-observed, empathetic story about families and secrets, wrapped up in some lovely art and with barnstorming voice acting performances at the heart of it. It's short but bittersweet.
If you're interested in a three-hour narrative adventure in the vein of Gone Home and Tacoma, and you can justify the current price, then there's a memorable-enough time to be had with Open Roads. There's not a wasted detail in the game's storytelling and there's a lot to appreciate in the subtle and skilful way it leads you through its tale. We enjoyed the little moments of character growth that came from Opal and Tess throughout. By the end, we felt as if we knew them. The game's ending also, genuinely, surprised us, which is an impressive feat. There's a heartfelt originality to Open Roads. But, yes, the gameplay is also limited. The 'pick up an object, have a conversation' repetition only has a temporary appeal. Whether the game is for you or not depends entirely on how you feel about the genre as a whole.
Open Roads offer a window into being a parent and growing up. It's emotional, insightful, and beautifully designed with an engaging story.
Open Roads is a lovely way to spend 90 minutes or so. All of the elements by and large come together harmoniously in service of a story that had me hooked just enough, and the two strong central performances elevate the entire piece. I can’t ask for much more than that. Like all good road trips, though, it’s more about the journey than the destination.
Open Roads is a first-person adventure game that focuses on the mother-daughter relationship and uses dialogue as its primary narrative tool, in addition to the classic environmental exploration typical of the genre. Overall, it is a very intimate and enjoyable experience that actually feels like a family road trip, but it ends up being too ephemeral to make an impression, due to a somewhat abrupt unraveling of the mystery that serves as the narrative pretext for the adventure, and a series of stylistic choices that take some of the power away from the story's emotional impact.
Review in Italian | Read full review
A barely-interactive movie that follows a mother and daughter road trip that is disappointingly short on both drama and meaningful choices.
Open Roads is the quintessential Annapurna Interactive video game. There are prominent actors giving authentic performances in a story that’s beautifully written, there’s a unique approach to art direction, and the music is top-of-the-line. I didn’t vibe with all of the design decisions, but it’s impossible to walk away from Open Roads without feeling at least a little contemplative about your own life journey and relationships.
Open Roads has a strong emotional core and great performances from its leads, but simplistic gameplay and some clumsy writing hold it back.
Open Roads often feels like a game at odds with itself, that probably would have been best served in a different genre. Whilst it starts off strong, it progressively loses what makes it good and feels more disconnected. Despite that, the two main characters have an engaging mother, daughter relationship that make the game worth playing, in no small part thanks to the excellent actresses, and their performances.
Open Roads is an extremely classic narrative adventure that nevertheless offers a mature and passionate story. The game design focuses on the key engines of the many productions of this type and succeeds in the complex attempt to prove pleasant and surprising. A production that, without a doubt, has its own personality. Exactly like that of Annapurna Interactive, one might say.
Review in Italian | Read full review