Like watching a car crash.
Open Roads had a very rocky development, and it's not hard to tell. Announced about four years ago at The Game Awards and three years after the studio's then-latest release of Tacoma, Open Roads ran into some trouble when it came out that Steve Gaynor was a microtyrant who was forcing employees out of his company. In a true success story for the industry, he'd only been abusing his power over his subordinates to humiliate and demean them (specifically focusing his ire on the women at his company), and not to sexually harass them — please, hold your applause for the man until the end. The news broke that this dipshit and his stupid haircut had been responsible for turning over nearly the entire workforce of Fullbright over the course of just two years, and Gaynor stepped down ahead of the story coming out. He said he was very very sorry for his behavior and that he wouldn't do it again, but also that he wasn’t sorry enough to surrender the company name. Open Roads is now credited to "The Open Roads Team", comprised of the couple of employees who were left in the wake of his reign and whoever else they could bring on to save the project from a shallow grave. The game released just a few days ago to a remarkably small audience and a middling reception, and it isn't difficult to see why.
Open Roads fucking sucks.
It's a game that's very obsessed with detail, yet is remarkably uninterested in its story. When the game let me open up a trash can and pick out every single piece of garbage individually to examine it in a 3D model viewer, I got the feeling that I wasn't going to enjoy this. The models themselves are all very intricate and detailed, each one of them complete with their own bespoke labels, and fine print, and they're all very lovingly put together, and I absolutely would not have noticed nor cared about any of this if a core component of the game wasn't picking up random objects and looking at them. There's a reason that movies don't feature characters picking up every loose object on the set and holding them up to camera, and that's because it's not particularly interesting to do that. I feel like I have to explain this from first principles. What do we gain by doing this? What do we gain from having the player pick up loose items and stare at them? What does that accomplish that just dressing the set with static objects wouldn't? It certainly makes the game last longer, because you need to pick up every piece of random bullshit in the hopes of finding the ones that advance you to the next section, but there's no appeal in doing that. It's busywork. So little worldbuilding actually happens by digging through these items; you'll be picking through erasers and pencils and plates, all such boring, domestic objects that don't have any character to them whatsoever. You can pick up some push pins and look at them. They're normal fucking push pins. You can pick up a fork and look at it. It's a normal fucking fork. You can pick up a comb and look at it. It's a normal fucking comb. What are we doing? Why? Is there something about allowing me to pick these objects up and look at them that does anything that leaving them in the scenery for me to look at wouldn't? Could we at least do something interesting with them? Express some personality through them? Give us a reason to investigate them? Anything, so long as it could give this a point.
Tonally, this is all over the place. Tess being kind of mood swing-y makes sense — she's fifteen, and nobody seems keen on telling her fucking anything on the grounds of it being "too complicated", despite one of the core conflicts of the game being completely resolved in a literal three minute talk at the end — but Opal falls into this pattern as well. Tess will go way, way too far in making an accusation or just trying to come up with something that would hurt her mom, and Opal will respond in kind, and then the pair of them will act like nothing ever happened. One sequence has them blow up on one another, refuse to say another word until the end of the car ride, and then resume quipping and bantering not even thirty seconds later. It takes more time for you to eat the fucking burger that Opal buys you at the motel than it does for the only two principle characters in this story to have a ground-shattering fight and then completely resolve it. The store description boasts that Tess and Opal’s relationship has “never been easy” when it so obviously is. If I had said so much as a fraction of the shit Tess says to my own mom, I would have demolished our relationship. Instead, it’s all glossed over, all just Buffyspeak for the pile. If wry quips were currency, Tess and Opal wouldn't have to sell the house.
The game can't ever decide whether it's time to floor it or slam the brakes, and instead has you constantly whipping back and forth between long segments of doing fucking nothing besides wandering around to rotate ashtrays and then blasting forward with story development that you barely even have time to register as happening before it's over. Your grandfather died, but he wasn't actually your grandfather, but he was a jewel thief, but he was your grandfather, but he might still be alive, but he tried to turn himself in, but who cares, but maybe your professional gambler father can enlighten you, but roll credits. Christ. We spend 90% of the runtime walking around and investigating literal fucking garbage and then cram way too much of this incredibly boring story into not enough time to tell it. This isn't even an Open Roads problem, but Open Roads is a symptom; so many games have fucking atrocious pacing. I've started celebrating anything that can get to credits without rushing or dragging. At least this has the decency to be over in an hour and a half, despite the fact that it does nothing with that time.
Would you believe me if I told you that this controlled badly? For a game this simple, just about every control scheme has something completely broken about it. If you're playing on a gamepad (the optimal way to play), menus are often incredibly sticky and require a few button presses before they actually register that you want to move your cursor up or down. Getting from New Game to Continue on the main menu took four down presses to move the selection box down once. Objects that you can interact with are what I can only describe as "sticky"; moving your reticle near them will drastically decrease your sensitivity and pull your view towards the item like a magnet, ensuring that you can easily pick up the item without having to fiddle with getting the reticle placement just right. This, in theory, is a great idea. In practice, the fact that so many fucking items in the game can be interacted with means that your view is constantly being dragged around, making it feel like you're fighting with the controls when you're trying to look up from a desk to the exit door. You can't move your camera freely unless you're staring off into empty space, because your reticle keeps getting caught on objects and making it incredibly difficult for you to look away from them. It should not be this frustrating simply trying to look around a room.
Doing this on a mouse is where the fun really begins, though. I don't know what happened with my copy of the game, because I can't imagine that this happened to anyone else and they didn't see fit to mention it; it's obviously a bug, but it's also really funny that it made to the final release. Mouselook, for some ungodly reason, is locked to eight directions. It also "snaps" when you move it around, jumping from one point to another rather than smoothly gliding between them. I thought it had something to do with the controller being plugged in, but it persisted through both unplugging the gamepad and restarting the PC. I can't really explain how bad this is through text, so I've graciously provided you with a video so that you won't have to experience it for yourself. Nobody should know these horrors, but I do. You should not be made to carry this burden.
I feel bad giving it this low of a score, because I usually prefer to reserve the half-stars for works that are actively harmful. The kind of thing that does damage. But there is absolutely nothing that I like here. I detest the writing, I detest playing it, I detest the way that it looks, I can't fucking stand it. This game radiates a horrid energy that enters me in waves and saps my will. The writers have almost never worked on anything else in their lives and one of the lead art directors made Dream Daddy. We're not dealing with heavy hitters of the industry, here. These are people who are uniquely underqualified coming in to try and salvage an extant work tainted by employee abuse because throwing out the name and starting over would be bad for brand recognition.
Despite the fact that this is intended as something of a follow-up to Gone Home, there's almost nobody left from that project who's still working on this one. This isn't a successor project so much as it is an imitation, all of the gaps smoothed over with drywall mud from Annapurna helping to pull in nearly three hundred fucking contractors to get this out. What compelled them to go ahead with releasing this? Open Roads is the ship of Theseus. Clearly everybody who knew what they were doing when they were still under the Fullbright banner is gone with no intention of coming back, and the ones with a clue who survived Gaynor's reign don't have enough of a voice under the fucking mountain of outside artists and developers being brought in to push this out the door.
Open Roads is a game that clearly has talented people on board, but is helmed by a team lead (or leads, plural) who have no clue what do to with them. There’s so much wasted potential here. It sucks to see all of these people wriggle out from under the thumb of an abusive manager just to immediately be put beneath the thumb of a new manager who’s incompetent, instead. I can’t write here what I hope happens to Steve Gaynor. I do hope that whoever’s left from Fullbright can leave Annapurna behind and make something better than their oldest work, because I know they’re capable of it. They just need a leader who isn’t a fucking moron.
Hey, mom!
Open Roads had a very rocky development, and it's not hard to tell. Announced about four years ago at The Game Awards and three years after the studio's then-latest release of Tacoma, Open Roads ran into some trouble when it came out that Steve Gaynor was a microtyrant who was forcing employees out of his company. In a true success story for the industry, he'd only been abusing his power over his subordinates to humiliate and demean them (specifically focusing his ire on the women at his company), and not to sexually harass them — please, hold your applause for the man until the end. The news broke that this dipshit and his stupid haircut had been responsible for turning over nearly the entire workforce of Fullbright over the course of just two years, and Gaynor stepped down ahead of the story coming out. He said he was very very sorry for his behavior and that he wouldn't do it again, but also that he wasn’t sorry enough to surrender the company name. Open Roads is now credited to "The Open Roads Team", comprised of the couple of employees who were left in the wake of his reign and whoever else they could bring on to save the project from a shallow grave. The game released just a few days ago to a remarkably small audience and a middling reception, and it isn't difficult to see why.
Open Roads fucking sucks.
It's a game that's very obsessed with detail, yet is remarkably uninterested in its story. When the game let me open up a trash can and pick out every single piece of garbage individually to examine it in a 3D model viewer, I got the feeling that I wasn't going to enjoy this. The models themselves are all very intricate and detailed, each one of them complete with their own bespoke labels, and fine print, and they're all very lovingly put together, and I absolutely would not have noticed nor cared about any of this if a core component of the game wasn't picking up random objects and looking at them. There's a reason that movies don't feature characters picking up every loose object on the set and holding them up to camera, and that's because it's not particularly interesting to do that. I feel like I have to explain this from first principles. What do we gain by doing this? What do we gain from having the player pick up loose items and stare at them? What does that accomplish that just dressing the set with static objects wouldn't? It certainly makes the game last longer, because you need to pick up every piece of random bullshit in the hopes of finding the ones that advance you to the next section, but there's no appeal in doing that. It's busywork. So little worldbuilding actually happens by digging through these items; you'll be picking through erasers and pencils and plates, all such boring, domestic objects that don't have any character to them whatsoever. You can pick up some push pins and look at them. They're normal fucking push pins. You can pick up a fork and look at it. It's a normal fucking fork. You can pick up a comb and look at it. It's a normal fucking comb. What are we doing? Why? Is there something about allowing me to pick these objects up and look at them that does anything that leaving them in the scenery for me to look at wouldn't? Could we at least do something interesting with them? Express some personality through them? Give us a reason to investigate them? Anything, so long as it could give this a point.
Tonally, this is all over the place. Tess being kind of mood swing-y makes sense — she's fifteen, and nobody seems keen on telling her fucking anything on the grounds of it being "too complicated", despite one of the core conflicts of the game being completely resolved in a literal three minute talk at the end — but Opal falls into this pattern as well. Tess will go way, way too far in making an accusation or just trying to come up with something that would hurt her mom, and Opal will respond in kind, and then the pair of them will act like nothing ever happened. One sequence has them blow up on one another, refuse to say another word until the end of the car ride, and then resume quipping and bantering not even thirty seconds later. It takes more time for you to eat the fucking burger that Opal buys you at the motel than it does for the only two principle characters in this story to have a ground-shattering fight and then completely resolve it. The store description boasts that Tess and Opal’s relationship has “never been easy” when it so obviously is. If I had said so much as a fraction of the shit Tess says to my own mom, I would have demolished our relationship. Instead, it’s all glossed over, all just Buffyspeak for the pile. If wry quips were currency, Tess and Opal wouldn't have to sell the house.
The game can't ever decide whether it's time to floor it or slam the brakes, and instead has you constantly whipping back and forth between long segments of doing fucking nothing besides wandering around to rotate ashtrays and then blasting forward with story development that you barely even have time to register as happening before it's over. Your grandfather died, but he wasn't actually your grandfather, but he was a jewel thief, but he was your grandfather, but he might still be alive, but he tried to turn himself in, but who cares, but maybe your professional gambler father can enlighten you, but roll credits. Christ. We spend 90% of the runtime walking around and investigating literal fucking garbage and then cram way too much of this incredibly boring story into not enough time to tell it. This isn't even an Open Roads problem, but Open Roads is a symptom; so many games have fucking atrocious pacing. I've started celebrating anything that can get to credits without rushing or dragging. At least this has the decency to be over in an hour and a half, despite the fact that it does nothing with that time.
Would you believe me if I told you that this controlled badly? For a game this simple, just about every control scheme has something completely broken about it. If you're playing on a gamepad (the optimal way to play), menus are often incredibly sticky and require a few button presses before they actually register that you want to move your cursor up or down. Getting from New Game to Continue on the main menu took four down presses to move the selection box down once. Objects that you can interact with are what I can only describe as "sticky"; moving your reticle near them will drastically decrease your sensitivity and pull your view towards the item like a magnet, ensuring that you can easily pick up the item without having to fiddle with getting the reticle placement just right. This, in theory, is a great idea. In practice, the fact that so many fucking items in the game can be interacted with means that your view is constantly being dragged around, making it feel like you're fighting with the controls when you're trying to look up from a desk to the exit door. You can't move your camera freely unless you're staring off into empty space, because your reticle keeps getting caught on objects and making it incredibly difficult for you to look away from them. It should not be this frustrating simply trying to look around a room.
Doing this on a mouse is where the fun really begins, though. I don't know what happened with my copy of the game, because I can't imagine that this happened to anyone else and they didn't see fit to mention it; it's obviously a bug, but it's also really funny that it made to the final release. Mouselook, for some ungodly reason, is locked to eight directions. It also "snaps" when you move it around, jumping from one point to another rather than smoothly gliding between them. I thought it had something to do with the controller being plugged in, but it persisted through both unplugging the gamepad and restarting the PC. I can't really explain how bad this is through text, so I've graciously provided you with a video so that you won't have to experience it for yourself. Nobody should know these horrors, but I do. You should not be made to carry this burden.
I feel bad giving it this low of a score, because I usually prefer to reserve the half-stars for works that are actively harmful. The kind of thing that does damage. But there is absolutely nothing that I like here. I detest the writing, I detest playing it, I detest the way that it looks, I can't fucking stand it. This game radiates a horrid energy that enters me in waves and saps my will. The writers have almost never worked on anything else in their lives and one of the lead art directors made Dream Daddy. We're not dealing with heavy hitters of the industry, here. These are people who are uniquely underqualified coming in to try and salvage an extant work tainted by employee abuse because throwing out the name and starting over would be bad for brand recognition.
Despite the fact that this is intended as something of a follow-up to Gone Home, there's almost nobody left from that project who's still working on this one. This isn't a successor project so much as it is an imitation, all of the gaps smoothed over with drywall mud from Annapurna helping to pull in nearly three hundred fucking contractors to get this out. What compelled them to go ahead with releasing this? Open Roads is the ship of Theseus. Clearly everybody who knew what they were doing when they were still under the Fullbright banner is gone with no intention of coming back, and the ones with a clue who survived Gaynor's reign don't have enough of a voice under the fucking mountain of outside artists and developers being brought in to push this out the door.
Open Roads is a game that clearly has talented people on board, but is helmed by a team lead (or leads, plural) who have no clue what do to with them. There’s so much wasted potential here. It sucks to see all of these people wriggle out from under the thumb of an abusive manager just to immediately be put beneath the thumb of a new manager who’s incompetent, instead. I can’t write here what I hope happens to Steve Gaynor. I do hope that whoever’s left from Fullbright can leave Annapurna behind and make something better than their oldest work, because I know they’re capable of it. They just need a leader who isn’t a fucking moron.
Hey, mom!
UnikOffical
13 days ago