videogameblog

When Gone Home begins, you listen to a voicemail left by the player character. She's returning home from a trip to Europe. When the screen fades to gameplay, you're standing on a dimly-lit porch. It's raining. There's a note on the door: "Don't go digging around trying to find out where I am". After you make your way inside and the lights flicker on, a mystery has already been established and the atmosphere of the creepy old house has set in. Objects of little importance aren't common in the earlier areas you'll explore; you can pick up an invoice which triggers a voiceover sequence, listen to the answering machine with some mysterious messages on it or find a postcard sent by the player character from her Europe trip. It's clear that the position and order in which you discover these items has been heavily considered in order to make the house feel like an inhabited space. In only a brief few minutes, without the presence of any characters whatsoever, Gone Home is able to establish the player character's identity, stakes and relation to the environment. It's also able to create a creepy, mysterious atmosphere AND create intrigue in uncovering the location of your missing family. The narrative techniques it employs may be simple, but act as an extremely effective introduction. It's easily one of my favorite games of all time because of stuff like this, snooping around the house never gets old.

When Open Roads begins, you're standing in your room. a menu immediately pops out from the side of the screen: "Mom wants me to pack up my room for the move next week". Then you're tasked with picking up and pressing 'E' on every object in the room. There's no consideration to what you pick up, and the objects you interact with don't really convey any information to the player through any means other than blatant ones. You pick up a hairbrush. an eraser. another eraser. A card from your grandma. It reads: "May you enjoy all the blessings of your coming year". What are we doing here? It all feels so pointless. You can pick up and examine objects in Open Roads for no reason other than 'because that's what you did in Gone Home and Tacoma.' After you're done packing (which you can do whenever you want, it doesn't matter how much you pack) you're shifted to a third person perspective and teleported to the basement to have an extremely stiff, exposition heavy conversation with your mother. I can't help but feel that Open Roads is an immense step-back from the Fullbright Team's other projects. It's easy to figure out why this is the case, saying that it went through a rocky development would be an understatement. During development, head of The Fullbright Company, Steve Gaynor, was outed for workplace abuse (fuck steve gaynor). After this, he stepped back from the company completely. A small number of devs decided to attempt to finish Open Roads under a new name: 'The Open Roads Team'. I suspect that the drawbacks present are likely due to these development issues. Gone Home feels like a tight, interconnected web of information that would require constant communication between writers, texture artists and level designers to achieve. It doesn't feel like that same web even begun to come into form in Open Roads.

In Gone Home, every object you pick up and examine feels like part of an interconnected web of context, intertwining relevancies from hair dye bottles to polaroid photographs. You can also pick up and move objects around as you please, which is great for making the space feel occupied. Tacoma takes this system of object relocation a step further, allowing the player to find misplaced objects like the skull of an anatomical skeleton and re-place it on the top of the model. You're never prompted to do this, but the prescence of the option allows for much more player expression. You'd expect Open Roads to continue this tradition, but instead the physics engine is omitted completely. Instead you press on an object and it floats infront of you like a glorified-3D model viewer. In regards to the 'interconnected web of context' I mentioned, this is also completely missing. Both Gone Home and Tacoma take place in one large setting, revealing new areas to the player using keys, à la Resident Evil. Open Roads takes place in THREE different houses for some reason, completely decimating this web and instead reducing it to a select number of objects the player must discover in order to move onto the next area. The definition of environmental storytelling I typically refer to is one by John Mulholland: he argues it "requires a level of curiosity and deductive reasoning from the player to connect the dots and add richness to the overall story". Gone Home is a perfect example of this kind of storytelling, leaving it to the player to deduce the connections between each object. Instead of doing this, Open Roads instead gives you the option to call over your mom, who will then exchange extremely rigid and bland dialogue with the player character about the object. The prescence of other characters also goes against what made Gone Home and Tacoma so effective. I've written about the invasiveness of these games, and the way that they allow you to view multifaceted characters from multiple perspectives by examining the way in which they interact with multiple others, instead of only with the player character. Your mum being there and being like "oh yeah that's my old boyfriends fucking uhh motorcycle glove" ruins this completely. They don't even take full advantage of her prescence, she magically appears whenever you pick something up. The environment is literally devoid of characters!! It's like it was initially built without the dialogue and it was added in later on. Open Roads completely excludes the fundamental narrative techniques that made Gone Home such a unique experience.

The narrative of Gone Home is simple. You're initially expecting something horror related due to the way the atmosphere is used as a red herring. Instead, you find Gone Home is a queer love story. It's extremely well-written and paced, I still cry at the end every time I play it. The underlying thread of 'where is everyone' keeps you guessing throughout. You might initially think your family is dead, then you might think they're in the attic. It's a simple concept paired with a love story that gets some extreme milage. The narrative of Open Roads isn't nearly as engaging. For the first 40 minutes you're just milling about in your house picking up random shit until you eventually go up in the attic and find a box of your grandma's old stuff with some mysterious post cards in it that imply she was having an affair? Why should I care? Then you and your mum go on a road trip to uncover the mystery behind your dead grandmas affair that happened 50 years ago. Admittedly the twist is pretty good so I won't spoil it, but it all seems so silly. It's disjointed and boring, paired with a variety of different extremely bland settings to explore. The environmental storytelling is so shallow in each environment. One place has a bunch of empty alchohol bottles everywhere. Person who lived here was alchoholic. It never goes any deeper than that. And if somehow you didn't figure that out, your mum interjects and is like "wow i guess this guy was an alchoholic". I know that!! I know!!

You can tell the people involved with Open Roads really cared about it. It's a real shame that it didn't land properly. The models are all extremely detailed, to the same quality as Gone Home and Tacoma. Most of the settings you explore look very pretty, the lightning is excellent. Some of the dialogue can be pretty funny sometimes, a little cringe other times. If anything, at least this will look great on the level designer's portfolios. It's still kinda fun to just walk around and look at all the really detailed models. Ironically the narrative involvement is so severed from most of these environments that they feel more like museums; alot of the time I completely forgot what I was doing and was more enamoured with looking at the pretty mugs in the cupboards.

When the credits rolled, I thought I'd watch to the end to see the names of the dev's cats, something that was featured in both Gone Home and Tacoma. Instead, I was greeted by an exhaustive list of credits that ran for what felt like 10 minutes listing the names of almost THREE HUNDRED different contractors that were hired to finish this game. This is why that web of connections I mentioned earlier can't be felt here. The project feels more frankensteined together than thought-out. I think ultimately it would have been better if this was cancelled. (there's no cat easter egg either...)