I have a jacket that is eerily similar to the outfit in Tess. open road. It’s a blue bomber with yellow and burnt orange accents, and that’s not the only thing Tess and I have in common. In the first few minutes of the game, Tess leisurely explores her childhood bedroom, which she discovers is set in the early 2000s. Inside were a heavy black television and scattered DVD cases, small bottles of bright nail polish, black and white strips from the photo booth, newspapers commemorating 9/11 and the search for Bigfoot, and a tube of bright pink lip balm. . These are the holdovers from her adolescence—the room is messy, mostly empty, and most of her belongings are packed away and ready for the move. Tess flips through the remaining photos and yearbooks in the room, her hand-drawn fingers reaching out to interact with the 3D objects, revealing more of her backstory with each touch. The cuffs of her jacket look eerily familiar every time she appears in the frame.
open road is a narrative-driven, exploration-focused game that follows Tess and her mother on a road trip following a death in the family. After cleaning out the house and discovering a mysterious diary in the attic, Tess and her mother, Opal, printed out directions on RoadBuddy (not MapQuest) and went on a long drive. Mood swings are bound to ensue.
I watched the developers play the first 15 minutes or so open road, the preview immediately attracted me. Visually, the game is beautiful and engaging; the settings and interactive objects are all 3D, while the characters are hand-drawn, carving depth into each scene. Developers on the Open Roads team uploaded real-life handwriting samples to create yearbook pages, postcards, and letters, eliminating the threat of pixelated text that breaks immersion. In dialogue, characters float between actions like an old-school Disney storyboard, making the entire experience feel like a lucid dream.
Tess and Opal are fully voiced by two mainstream actors, Caitlin Dever and Keri Russell, and in the scenes I saw, their performances were fantastic. The interaction between Tess and Opal is both loving and tense, much like a mother-daughter relationship. The writing is also evocative and sincere; conversations flow smoothly even as the player chooses the different paths each conversation can take. The characters immediately feel real.
The house that Tess and Opal left was occupied and had a sense of history. Each room has a personal, handcrafted style, with the developers adding bits and pieces of their own lives to the game. The chair next to the table? It’s modeled after the developers’ own childhood memories. Those old, creepy decorations in the attic? The developer’s grandmother passed down these decorations in real life. Graffiti on the wall? They are paintings by the children of their creators. These details won’t be obvious to most players, but they give the game a sense of realism as Tess explores the closets and corners of her home.
open road Not only does it offer nostalgia from the early 2000s, it also reaches back to the 1960s and 1970s, covering multiple generations of Tess’s family. As Tess investigates the house and picks up various items, Opal provides context and tells the story of their lives, with branching dialogue paths. At one point during the preview, the developer who was playing decided to let Tess leave the refrigerator without closing the door, causing Opal to scold her. Tess and Opal’s relationship is charming and heartwarming, but there’s a tension in their interactions that I was eager to examine throughout the game.
open road It feels like a mix Go home, life is strange and What’s left of Edith Finch?, in the best possible way. The writing, voice acting, and animation styles all work together in the first few minutes of the game to create a realistic yet nostalgic world filled with vivid characters. When the game launches on PC, Switch, PlayStation, and Xbox on February 22, I’ll be ready to hit the road with Tess, Opal, and their printed driving directions. After all, I already have the jacket.
This article originally appeared on Engadget: https://www.engadget.com/open-roads-preview-bring-me-to-life-in-2003-170007873.html?src=rss
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