Open Roads is a game that ripples through the past while your mother watches

In Steve Gaynor’s attic there’s a box that does not belong to him. He bought his home in Portland from a family that offered the home for sale after the death of the elderly owner. Months later, Gaynor and his wife discover a cardboard box full of letters and other artifacts from a stranger’s life. “There was this story about this person who was part of this family who were all in this one cardboard box,” Gaynor said.

It’s an anecdote that’s almost too good to be true: a co-founder of Fullbright, a studio known for its groundbreaking ‘walking sim’ games, living out its own Home-style adventure. Gaynor wondered not only about the owner of the box, but also about the possibilities of these items: “How can we express the feeling of discovering those things together?”

The answer may just be Fullbright’s new project, Open roads, a mother-daughter journey with Keri Russell as mother Opal and Kaitlyn Dever as teen Tess. Announced late last year, Open roads is a first-person exploration game where players dig through deserted places for clues about 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-driven experience, where the mystery is personal and built around relationships.

But where games in the past allowed the player to be a true voyeur, he left to fiddle with personal objects and history, Open roads has perhaps the most zealous of all possible companions: your mother. “You can get away with a lot if you’re just in space,” Gaynor says. ‘There’s this kind of permission to be offensive in some way in our other games, where we say it’s good to dig deep into others’ personal stuff. I think in some cases in Open roads, it just becomes part of the conversation. Opal will have her own opinions on what you find, as well as the history she can share through her eyes. How and why she intervenes, and what it says about her perspective, as well as her relationship with Tess, are part of the game’s structure.

And then there’s Tess, the player character. Open roads is Fullbright’s first venture to play with branching dialogue, a choice that, according to Gaynor, serves to express who Tess is, rather than to influence the outcome of the game. “You’re a bit on the road with Opal, but within that you as Tess have a lot of control over how you want to deal with your mother,” he says. How prominent or supportive a player wants to be, for example, is their privilege.

In the last decade, the stories of games have fallen in love with the so-called sad father – look at figures like Joel van The last of us becomes a replacement for Ellie, or God of warsays Kratos on a journey with his son. But mothers in games have yet to be represented with such complexity or even commonality. These relationships can be fickle and emotionally complicated. In other words, they are ripe for engaging stories. ‘What is more interesting for us to put on the screen? What is a story that is not told so much? says Gaynor.

Influenced by stories such as Lady Bird and girl experiences from team members, including Gaynor co-author and wife Rachel, wanted Fullbright to pay tribute to experiences they had in their own lives. Open roads is a matriarchal story, with Tess and Opal preoccupied with the unknown life of Tess’s grandmother.

“I feel like there’s a moment in our whole life where you have the grandparent who passed away,” Gaynor says. “When you are exposed to the things they left behind and have to sort them out, you discover things about them that you may never have known or forgotten about.” Part of it means playing with the idea of ​​an unreliable narrator. Memories become confusing, and personal experience colors memories: “Can I find the true truth through the exploration we do?”

As for the attic, Gaynor could not find the family to which it belonged. “It’s not ours to do anything with,” he says, not wanting to throw it away. It serves as a reminder of how it felt to put together the pieces of someone’s life with a loved one. “We wanted to pay tribute to the experience of learning more about who those people were, maybe to the point where you could really talk to them about it,” he says of Open roads. ‘Maybe make it [the player] think of their own experience with those moments in their lives. ”