This month’s offerings for Xbox Game Pass subscribers is a veritable feast of good games. Baseball fans can dive into MLB The Show 24 just in time for playoff season, action fans can revisit 2022’s martial arts game Sifu, or you could enjoy some spooky vibes in card-based roguelike Inscryption. One title that might not immediately jump out at you, but is still well worth your time, is Open Roads, a game about a family road trip.
Open Roads begins with the death of protagonist Tess’s grandmother and an impromptu road trip to uncover old family secrets. Tess, voiced by Kaitlyn Dever (HBO’s The Last of Us season two’s Abby), is a teenage girl with a contentious relationship with her mother Opal (The Americans’ Keri Russel). It’s a pretty familiar mother-daughter dynamic, but the third figure, Opal’s mom and Tess’s grandmother, looms over the two at all times. She might be dead, but her secret is what sends Tess and Opal on an adventure that teases out their generational trauma.
This road trip is more about the handful of stops you make along the way rather than the drive, tasking you with exploring these smaller spaces (An empty house filled with moving boxes, an abandoned vacation home, a boat) on foot as Tess. All of these places are filled with objects and traces of past lives for both Tess and Opal to uncover. The developers behind Open Roads used to work at Fullbright—of Gone Home fame—so you’ll walk around and pick up objects just as you did in the seminal 2013 walking simulator. Just like Open Roads’ spiritual predecessor, the story is told mostly through piecing together context clues found in the environments and objects of the world. News clippings, pictures, letters, and more bring out the (maybe purposely) forgotten frustrations between three generations of women in the family: Tess, Opal, and the grandmother.
While Gone Home had you exploring an empty house on your own, Open Roads keeps Tess and Opal together at all times. Instead of lonely reminiscing, each discovery turns into an opportunity for dialogue between mother and daughter. This is one of Open Roads greatest strengths, as Dever and Russel are both wonderful performers. Hearing the two actors play off each other feels less like a game and more like an intimate play. The game’s runtime reflects that, as it only takes about two hours tops to complete. If you want to experience a short but emotionally packed story carried by its excellent performances then Open Roads is the game for you. Its inclusion on Game Pass means that you don’t have a good reason not to play it. Even if you don’t like it, you’ll only have lost two hours of your life.
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