National Post (National Edition)
One for the Roads
Adventure game focuses on teen girl and her single mom
Fullbright, a video game studio based in Portland, has long excelled at weaving compelling stories that focus on places and the people who inhabited them. The studio's past releases, Gone Home and Tacoma, were critical darlings. Now, with Open Roads, the team hopes to evolve those concepts, placing them in a new story featuring a mother and daughter duo — a sorely under-represented dynamic in video games.
Open Roads, which debuted at The Game Awards late last year, has been in development for the past two years and will release in 2021. Like Fullbright's previous games, Open Roads is a narrative-driven adventure that centres on relationships. You play as Tess, a teenage girl on a road trip with her single mom, Opal. After the death of Tess's grandmother, the mother and daughter rummage through Grandma's belongings, finding hints of “deep-rooted family secrets” about burglaries and lost treasure near the Canadian border.
“It sends them out on this shared journey of wanting to find out what really happened in their family that neither of them know the truth about,” Fullbright co-founder and Open Roads head writer Steve Gaynor said. “Along the way, they have these other more fundamental aspects of their relationship that they're not aligned on.”
Annapurna Interactive's ties to the film industry via Annapurna Pictures made it possible for Open Roads to enlist talent like Kaitlyn Dever (Booksmart) as Tess and Keri Russell (The Americans, Star Wars: Rise of Skywalker) as Opal.
Recording lines with Dever and Russell has only just begun. The pandemic presented some challenges: Gaynor prefers to “share a space and make eye contact” with the cast during recording sessions. For Open Roads, all the recording is done through voice calls on Zoom.
“Since it's about these two characters being in this relationship and having dialogue together, we really value recording those sessions with both of them present and having them perform scenes together as a back and forth and not piecemealing it, which can happen a lot,” Gaynor said. “We're doing the best version of it right now that we can.”
The story is wrapped in a colourful esthetic that mixes 3D backgrounds with 2D, hand-drawn characters, inspired by visual novels, mid-century Disney movies and Hayao Miyazaki films. The art direction encourages players to fill the blanks with their own imagination, similar to Fullbright games such as Tacoma or Gone Home, which have players examine objects to learn about characters who don't make an appearance in the game.
Though prior projects featured gay or lesbian characters, Open Roads doesn't. This is partly because it didn't fit the story, but also so Fullbright wouldn't “pigeonhole” itself, Gaynor said.
“With Gone Home and Tacoma, we had characters where queerness was an important part of their identity. It had to be a central part of the narrative for that authenticity of telling their story. And in Open Roads, it's just not a focus of where these two characters are at in their lives.”