SPOILER-FREE REVIEW
With a blend of ethereal art and sound design, and a disorienting current of magical realism, Kentucky Route Zero makes for an awe-inspiring journey despite its technical flaws.
Sometimes when I start drafting, I’ll find that some games are far harder to review than others. The reasons for this vary: some are just packed with lots of content, while others have positives and negatives that intertwine and make structure a nightmare. But there are a few that are intricate and immensely complex, that burst at the seams with creativity, themes and symbolism that make the discussion, and the review, difficult. For that reason, I’ve had more trouble than I’ve ever had writing about Kentucky Route Zero. With the release of the game’s fifth and final act, its creators at Cardboard Computer have completed an intricate, intelligent and stirring journey, and one that’s well worth taking.
It tells the story of Conway, a truck driver who’s journeying through Kentucky in his beat-up truck to make a final delivery for the antiques store he works for. After encountering Shannon, a young woman who makes a living repairing televisions, he learns that he needs to drive along the mysterious Route Zero to reach the delivery address, and sets out to find it. But as they drive on, they begin to encounter the strange, the unusual and the bizarre, as the lines between reality and fantasy begin to blur.
Games don’t exist in a vacuum and are influenced by the world around them. Kentucky Route Zero is no different; in fact, its seven-year-long development only makes the outside world’s creeping influence all the more obvious. It features an America in slow decay, and a Kentucky whose highways and quiet backroads are populated with drifters and shadows. Its characters are guilted by debt and struggle with losing their sense of self in a world where a faceless power company seized everything from telephone exchanges to petrol stations before suddenly abandoning them and leaving them to rot. The discovery of a collapsed mine in which company miners were trapped and left to drown in rising floodwater is emblematic of this game’s searing critique of American capitalism.
A powerful undercurrent of magical realism, the likes of which renowned author Gabriel Garcia Marquez would have been proud, infuses into everything from story to art design. All along the Zero, our characters have encounters with the strange, the unusual and the bizarre, all underscoring the game’s themes of debts, death and rebirth: a tiki-themed bar on an underground beach and a whiskey distillery run by ghostly orange skeletons are just two of the many locations that appear. All of these never feel incongruous thanks to the build-up; within the first five minutes, the game tips your expectations of a simple journey on their heads. These encounters are folded into the journey so the strange quickly becomes commonplace, but remains beautiful and extraordinary.
That current also seeps into the art and sound design, transforming the rural backwoods of Kentucky into an ethereal dreamlike landscape. The game’s polygonal graphics punch well above their weight, complementing both narrative and gameplay with simple colours and sharp, clean edges. The use of soft light is a standout feature, as is a willingness to experiment with black and white and monochrome, including a sequence where Conway stops his truck as the road is blocked by a herd of jet-black wild horses, serving to emphasise the true strangeness of this world. You could take any single frame and pass it off as a painting. Every so often, a band appears, silhouetted in the foreground, playing gentle country ballads.
Much of the story is told through conversations in which the player selects dialogue options to progress, but rather than choosing how characters act, the player’s responses shift the tone of the game and provide information for its characters to mould themselves around. There are no real right answers; whatever I chose to say about a character’s backstory became established fact. The game progresses to a point where you can even choose who responds in conversations. I could let Conway speak or hand over to Shannon, who’s more forceful and assertive, or hand over to Ezra, the young runaway with an overexcited imagination. There are even conversations where your characters interact with each other, essentially allowing you to speak to yourself and determine the flow of entire conversations. I felt as if I was directing an elaborate stage play with skilled actors adapting their characters according to my directions, writing and improvising as part of an unusual creative exercise. Despite a lack of voice-acting, our eclectic cast of characters are easy to like; even if they seemed to tag along with Conway and Shannon for no clear reason, their presence became a comfort. Their journey to find security and belonging feels consequential.
Route Zero cleverly utilises magical realism to refresh itself instead of resorting to the typical object puzzles to break the tedium. Conversations make up a lot of the gameplay, but there are also moments in which the game drastically shifts perspective. You’ll watch the characters from the perspective of a security camera and even play as a cat chasing a firefly, bumping into people and listening to their conversations. It also serves to highlight how experimental and unique this game really is for breaking all the established rules and industry convention about what games should be. It has more in common with a highbrow novel than DOOM.
At first, I struggled to appreciate Kentucky Route Zero’s free-floating narrative because I prefer to be grounded when playing games. For some, the unique experience will be enough of a selling point, but for others it sums up everything they dislike about the game industry’s pivot towards experimental games-as-art. I don’t really have an answer. Its meaning can be unclear, and the game can prove disorienting and even tedious as a result. Some things go unexplained. That combined with a few niggling technical issues, including Conway spending much of the game with an injured leg that causes him to move far too slowly, was enough to pull me out of the whole experience sometimes. I stopped having a headache and enjoyed it more once I figured it was meant to be savoured moment by moment.
We could do with more games like Kentucky Route Zero, even if, much like its main character, it sometimes struggles with delivery. In the end, this is still one of the finest road trips in video gaming history. All of its different elements, from the well-written central narrative to the stunning art and sound design, come together to create something that’s greater than the sum of its parts. If you like your games grounded: take a chance on this one, go with the flow and see where it takes you. Like me, you might be pleasantly surprised with both journey and destination.
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