Open Roads game review

Open Roads is the latest release from Fullbright Studio, the creator of Gone Home. Stay with Gimfa to review it.

In Gone Home, Fulbright Studios proved to everyone that video games can create a unique and exemplary storytelling and experience using only environmental elements, which cannot be found in any medium other than video games. Now in their new creation, they are again using environmental storytelling and using elements such as mobile phones, notes, posters, personal belongings, etc. to tell a family story and relatively mysterious.

Open Roads is a short game. To complete 100% of it, you will need about two and a half hours, which can be done even in a much shorter period of time. Open Roads is about the relationship of a mother and daughter named Tess and Opal who become closer to each other on the pretext of solving a family mystery, and through a road trip.

What catches our attention in the first place, more than anything else, is the meticulous and obsessive attention to detail. The creators, with exemplary attention, have spread the pieces of their story in the scenic environment of the game, and if we carefully look at the game environment, we will notice many of its hidden dimensions. The game starts with a three-person shot of Tess, the main character, and her mother and grandmother standing in the center of the picture.

We are in Tess' grandmother's house and we have to collect our things from there as Tess. Each of the items has a story to tell. Sometimes by calling the mother, we can ask her to tell us their story. The roles of Tess and Opal have been played by Kathleen Dever and Keri Russell, respectively, and in this sense, their performance is excellent; But unfortunately, due to the special style of the game's animations, in which only the first few words of the characters' words are in sync with the characters' lips and the rest of their words are not animated, the voices of these two famous actors are not as effective as they should be. It's as if their words are incomplete and somewhere in the middle of this particular style of animation, the sense of the characters is lost. Of course, make no mistake, dialogue writing and the way it is expressed is very good and acceptable; But visually, the game cannot correctly draw the relationship between the two characters.

Other than this issue, the game is smooth and lovable despite its shortness. Memories show up everywhere in the game. Grandmother Tess has passed away but her spirit can be seen and touched as if in all the things in her house. In addition to being a newspaper writer, he was also a potter and we can even see some of his work at home. One of these pottery vessels, made at the end of Grandma's life, is tragically crooked. The image of this dish, along with the story that Opal tells about it, is very memorable and beautiful. In fact, Open Roads is basically based on these small and seemingly insignificant things, but rich and full of stories, which at the same time, its story is not so mysterious, but it can build and define the relationships between the characters for us, and in this sense It must be said that the performance of the game in characterization is excellent.

One of the characters who has a very small presence in the game but remains in our memory is Tess's father. He and Opal have been estranged for several years, and when Tess sits in the car with her mother, he is mentioned. The relationship between all three of them is well defined for us, and then in a short conversation, we get to know Tess's father through a few messages that Tess exchanges with her father. In fact, one of the strengths of Open Roads is in characterizing the characters that are not implicitly present in the game; But by using their signs and traces in the game, we can get a relative knowledge of them.

The gameplay of Open Roads becomes a bit boring due to the monotonous and uncreative process, and perhaps it is not addressed as much as it should be. Of course, maybe the only way the game could have told its story in such detail was through this boring gameplay, and maybe any other kind of it couldn't have lived up to its personal story. In fact, the gameplay relies on the environment and repetitive and motif-like elements rather than being based on different mechanisms; Like every time we call mom to tell us a story, or every time we pick something up and examine it. In this sense, that is, in terms of environment design, the game is not only acceptable; But it is wonderful! Again, the game is very small, there is no special surprise of the story; However, the artistic design of the game environment and the story behind it are so good that, like Gone Home, it can engage us and be remembered for a long time.