Should Story Game Fans Play Open Roads?
- Ori
- Jun 24, 2025
- 2 min read
Updated: Sep 4, 2025
Visual novels often explore relationships between people, whether it be analysing the intrinsic nature of familiar, platonic or even romantic relationships. However, there are rarely games that show the true nature of a non-functional family. ‘Open Roads’ is a game that truly shocked me with every twist, and made me consider my own personal relationship with my family. The aspect of the ‘Mother-Daughter’ relationship is looked at closely throughout the game with the two main characters of Tess and her mother Opal. At the start, we are introduced to the situation they are going through: a move of house while they are mourning Tess’s grandmother. We are told a lot about Tess’s Grandma, her dreams, her goals and her general behaviour towards the characters. This all changes when Tess investigates the Attic, and finds a box with secret notes to another man.
As we find out more about the story, we accompany Tess and her mother on a car journey. We explore the difficult relationship that Mothers and Daughters also have, by viewing Opal as both a Mother and Daughter respectively. While her dad is not shown explicitly, he is a large source of tension. He is shown as Opal’s weakness: a contributing force to her own inevitable disagreements with her daughter. It shows the difficult relationship divorced parents have with prioritising their own children while trying to keep themselves stable enough to care for them.
Secrets emerge as a big part of their relationship: showing Tess’s duality with dealing with her Grandmother’s secrets while also trying to hold on to her own. She has to deal with her conscience of keeping the secret, the aftermath of her finding out after a fight and help her mother realise the true reasons for her overprotective nature. It shows how damaging secrets between all relationships can be, but also how essential they are to a relationship. Their relationship explicitly suffers at the revealing of the truth, implying how in every relationship that works there has to be small secrets. Opal can’t figure out why her grandmother doesn’t tell her about the information, completely disregarding how she feels about her own feelings as a mother of her own. When she realises that she kept the story of their divorce from Tess to ‘protect’ her, she realises how she had been doing the same thing that she has been attacking her mother for all along. Character growth is really shown for her when she tells the truth, being respected by Tess for it and not running away as a process. Overall, the game really shows how trust can impact a relationship, and the importance that lying and secrets have on different people.
So, should you play the game for the story alone? Yes, absolutely. The story is the driving force of the game, and is the reason for the overall success of the game. It’s shocking, sad and will make you reconsider every relationship you’ve ever had.
Play Open Roads on Steam, Xbox, PlayStation or Nintendo Switch:
Comments