Open Roads is a game of digging into the past while your mom is watching

In Steve Gaynor’s attic, there’s a box that doesn’t belong to him. He bought his Portland home from a family who put it up for sale after its elderly owner died. Months later, Gaynor and his wife discovered a cardboard box full of letters and other artifacts from a stranger’s life. “There was this story of this person who had been part of this family that was all contained in that one cardboard box,” Gaynor said.

It’s an anecdote almost too good to be believed: a co-founder of Fullbright, a studio known for pioneering walking simulation games, living his own Gone home– style adventure. Gaynor wonders not only about the owner of the box, but about the possibilities of these found objects: “How can we express this feeling of discovering these things together?”

The answer may well be Fullbright’s new project, Open roads, a mother-daughter road trip with Keri Russell as mum Opal and Kaitlyn Dever as teenage Tess. Announced at the end of last year, Open roads is a first-person exploration game in which players search abandoned places to find clues to a family member’s past. “It’s a game that in many ways continues our tradition of what we did at Fullbright,” Gaynor says. It is a story-based experience, where the mystery is personal and built around relationships.

But where past games allowed the player to be a real voyeur, left to rummage through personal items and history, Open roads has perhaps the most diligent of all possible companions: your mom. “You can get away with a lot of things when you’re just in space,” Gaynor says. “There’s that kind of permission to be transgressive in some way in our other games, where we kind of say it’s okay to dig deep into other people’s personal affairs. I think in some cases Open roads, it’s just part of the conversation. Opal will have her own opinions on what you find, as well as the story to share through her eyes. How and why she steps in, and what that says about her perspective, as well as her relationship with Tess, is part of the fabric of the game.

And then there’s Tess, the player character. Open roads is Fullbright’s first attempt at playing with branching dialogue, a choice that Gaynor says serves to express who Tess is, rather than impacting the outcome of the game. “You’re sort of on the way. of that trip with Opal, but inside of that you have a lot of control as Tess over how you want to relate to your mother, ”he says. A player’s degree of confrontation or support, for example, is his prerogative.

Over the past decade, gaming accounts have grown to love the so-called sad father – watching characters like Joel from The last of us become Ellie’s surrogate father, or God of the warKratos traveling with his son. But mothers in games have yet to be portrayed with such complexity or even commonality. These relationships can be fickle and emotionally convoluted. In other words, they’re ripe for engaging stories. “What could be more interesting for us to put on the screen? What is a story that isn’t told as much? Gaynor said.

Influenced by stories like Lady bird and the youthful experiences of team members, including Gaynor’s co-writer and wife Rachel, Fullbright wanted to pay tribute to the experiences they had in their own lives. Open roads is a matriarchal story, with Tess and Opal delving into the unknown life of Tess’ grandmother.

“I feel like there’s that time in all of our lives when you have the grandparent who passes away,” Gaynor says. “By being exposed to the things they left behind and having to sort them out, you uncover things about them that you may never have known or have forgotten.” Part of that means playing with the idea of ​​an unreliable narrator. Memories blend together and personal experience colors the memory: “Can I find the real truth through the exploration we do?”

As for the attic, Gaynor could not find the family to which it belongs. “It’s not for us to do something,” he said, not wanting to throw it away. It is reminiscent of what it was like to bring pieces of someone’s life together with a loved one. “We wanted to pay tribute… to that experience of finding out more about who these people really were, maybe after the moment you are really able to tell them about it,” he says of Open roads. “Maybe that makes [the player] think about their own experience of those moments in their lives. “