Open Roads is a game about rummaging in the past while your mom watches

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

It’s an anecdote too good to be believed: a co-founder of Fullbright, a studio known for being a pioneer in “walking simulator” games, living its own Went homestyle adventure. Gaynor asked himself not only about the owner of the box, but also about the possibilities of these items found: “How can we express this feeling of discovering these things together?”

The answer may just be Fullbright’s new project, Open roads, a mother-daughter trip starring Keri Russell as mother Opal and Kaitlyn Dever as teenager Tess. Announced at the end of last year, Open roads is a first-person exploration game in which players search abandoned places for clues to a family member’s past. “It’s a game that, in many ways, continues our tradition of what we’ve been doing at Fullbright,” says Gaynor. It is an experience guided by stories, where the mystery is personal and built around relationships.

But where previous games allowed the player to be a true voyeur, left to peruse personal objects and history at his leisure, Open roads he has perhaps the most diligent of all possible companies: his mother. “You can get away with it when you’re just in space,” says Gaynor. “There is this kind of permission to be a transgressor in a certain way in our other games, where we kind of say that it’s okay to dig deep into other people’s personal things. I think in some cases in Open roads, it becomes just part of the conversation. ”Opal will have its own opinions on what you find, as well as a story to share through your eyes. How and why she intervenes, and what that says about her perspective, as well as her relationship with Tess, is part of the structure of the game.

And then there’s Tess, the player’s character. Open roads is Fullbright’s first adventure in playing with branched dialogues, a choice Gaynor says serves to express who Tess is, rather than impacting the outcome of the game. “You are kind of on a path along this journey with Opal, but within that you have a lot of control like Tess over how you want to relate to your mom,” he says. The degree of confrontation or support that a player wants to be, for example, is his prerogative.

In the last decade or so, game narratives have come to love the so-called sad father – watching figures like Joel de The last of us become a substitute father for Ellie, or God of Warit is Kratos on a journey with his son. But mothers at games still need to be represented with such complexity or even similarity. These relationships can be unstable and emotionally complicated. In other words, they are ripe for engaging stories. “What is most interesting for us to put on the screen? What is a story that is not being told so much? ”Says Gaynor.

Influenced by stories like Lady Bird and childhood 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 it is a matriarchal story, with Tess and Opal investigating the unknown life of Tess’s grandmother.

“I feel like there is a moment in all of our lives when you have the grandfather who passed away,” says Gaynor. “By being exposed to the things they left behind and having to work it out, you discover things about them that you might never know or have forgotten.” Part of that means playing around with the idea of ​​an unreliable narrator. Memories are confused and personal experiences color the memory: “Can I find the real truth through the exploration we are doing?”

As for the attic box, Gaynor was unable to find the family he belongs to. “It is not ours to do something with it,” he says, not wanting to throw it away. It serves as a reminder of what it’s like to put the pieces of someone’s life together with a loved one. “We wanted to honor … the experience of finding out more about who these people really were, maybe after you really got to talk to them about it,” he says of Open roads. “Maybe [the player] think of your own experience with those moments in your life. “