In this modern time, it can be difficult to fully describe what a game even is. Such is the case with Kentucky Route Zero, something that I fully consider to be a modern masterpiece but calling it a game seems like a complete disservice to what it is. It isn’t a game, it’s a full experience. It’s a surreal trip through rural American, an examination of the runaway effects of unfettered capitalism, the journey of a struggling acholic man weighed down by his past but continues to pull up on those bootstraps so hard they’re libel to snap at any moment. It’s a point and click adventure where (get ready to roll your eyes) the journey is far more important than the destination. While it pained me to type that (it really did), nothing could be more accurate of a description of what you’ll experience by playing this game. Or interacting with it I suppose is a more apt description of what you’ll be doing. It’s a game where you choose dialogue options, and literally nothing else. On the surface that doesn’t sound like a game, and it barely seems a step above reading a book (imagine something so horrible…) but it’s an experience I couldn’t imagine being presented in any other way. If this were a movie, I don’t think it would have anywhere near the same emotional impact, and if it were a novel, I also don’t think that the written words themselves would come alive and jump off the page at you. It’s something that needs interactivity, that needs the ambience of buzzing cicadas and an omnipresent bluegrass band, and it needs you the player to stumble through the surreal world it places you in, to feel overwhelmed by choice, and feel stunned by its haunting beauty.
The set-up of Kentucky Route Zero is a simple one. You begin playing the role of Conway, a man who is already ground down to a pulp by the beginning of the game, a man weighed down by his past, his present, and his lack of a future. All Conway has left to look forward to is completing his final delivery to 5 Dogwood Drive as the antiques company that employees him is finally going out of business. Act I’s stark black background and the beautiful lights of Equus Oils is accompanied only by the humming of crickets on a humid night and the idling of Conway’s truck. One of the first interactions in the game is a simple choice you must make as you observe the few things around you. You see a dog near you “An old hound in a straw hat. Both have seen better days.” After this, the blind gas station attendant askes what the dog’s name is, and the player is presented with three choices.
- “His name is Homer”
- “Her name is Blue”
- “Just some dog. I don’t know his name.”
Here in one of the earliest moments of the game, KRZ is setting the stage for the kinds of interactions and tones that you can expect for the rest of your journey. It’s a game that has a story to tell, but it feels disingenuous to call this a “choose your own adventure.” Rather than choosing your adventure, KRZ guides you where it wants you to go, but allows you to make personal touches, the smallest of tweaks that reveal more information about a person, a place, a museum, or an office filled with bears. Act I’s set pieces also give you a glimpse at the not quite normal, not quite haunting nature of the world that you’ll inhabit. The ambient noise will continue whether you make a choice or not, it doesn’t care what you do, it is going on about its business and will continue to do so long after you’re gone.
Conway interacts with a broken computer trying to get directions to Dogwood Drive before he must head down into the basement. He runs into a group of three D&D playing friends who have lost their twenty-sided die. Conway finds it for them and in an instant they’re gone. They’ve carried on their conversations (and confusion) over the rules without a single acknowledgement of your presence. After they vanish into thin air, Conway regards them in the same way you’d imagine he regards most everything else in his life at this point, he simply shrugs and moves on. He gets directions to the nearby Marquez farmhouse, “just past the burning tree that is always on fire” and meets Weaver, a woman mentioned more often in the game than she is seen, a literal ghost that can vanish and disappear, and one by the end of the game you’re never entirely sure if she even existed. She is, as her cousin Shannon posits, “always been different.” You never do get much more than that.
Weaver Marquez tells Conway that in order to get to 5 Dogwood Drive to complete his delivery he’s going to need to take the Zero, a secret highway that runs underneath the caves in the area, and as the player will see soon enough, underneath and in-between the fabrics of space, time and our understanding of reality. Conway shrugs. The player shrugs. Then we’re off to find 5 Dogwood Drive. Where do you reckon the On-Ramp to the Zero is? Why, in the abandoned mines of course? That’s where we run into Weaver’s cousin, Shannon, your closest companion on this strange, strange journey you’ll undertake. Shannon seems very, very surprised that you’ve spoken to Weaver at the farmhouse, but never fully explains why that seems unusual to her. In a game that is entirely dialogue, it’s fascinating the way these characters say so much with so little at times.
The scenes, the places, and the people that you’ll meet in KRZ are equal parts beautiful, disturbing, sometimes heartbreaking, and sometimes all the above all at once. It’s a difficult thing to entirely nail down, very much like life itself. It’s a game and a story that really is about the messiness and the imperfections of life. It never tries to hide this fact from you, rather its completely in your face about the shortcomings of characters, the devastating effects of corporate greed on a small rural community, and even in the pointlessness of it all. Later in the game (while floating through a bat sanctuary) Conway and Shannon come across a switchboard operator that works in the darkness of the flooded tunnels, still slaving away even though the Power Company has long ago replaced him with an automated machine, and decided it was too expensive to fire him, so they just decide to let him continue to work, without pay. This is a fact the switchboard operator himself seems to realize, but perhaps he’s given himself over to the hopelessness and the absurdity of it all.
“What if there is no cheap machine that’s going to replace me? What if it’s cheaper just to keep me here, filling in for the rhythm of the operators… What if I’m the cheap machine?” He muses. You’re given the choices
- “Why don’t you just quit?”
- “You’re not a machine.”
to which the operator replies with exasperation “In this economy?” Moments this these are some of my favorites along the journey, with just how much they accomplish in such a short number of words. This interaction was one of my favorites in the game, in that it establishes an absurd principle, iterates upon it while making it seem completely logical in the internal logic of KRZ’s world, being equal parts hopeless, and funny. This game is all at once at so many points, which is why it clicks on so many levels. KRZ’s dry sense of humor straddles the line between salt of the earth folks just trying to get by, mixed with pieces that are so absurd they become so laughably believable that you have no choice but to shrug and get on with your business.
Another such moment comes in Act II when Conway and Shannon visit the Bureau of Reclaimed Spaces, an office complex that inhabits an old church. Why are they in the old church? Why of course because the church had to be relocated to the storage facility. Such is the nature of the Bureau. After visiting the church (which is not at the storage facility), Conway speaks with the janitor who plays recordings of old sermons to the congregation… rather where the congregation used to be. As he explained in the old days a lot more people used to show up, but now he plays the sermons to an audience of none. Also, the janitor isn’t even religious himself, he just feels a reverence, or a feeling that doing this is something he has to do, even though he doesn’t fully understand why. Much in the same way he doesn’t understand religion as he explains to Conway while a tape ends, “Ok, that’s it. Next there are some rituals that you and I aren’t allowed to participate in, I don’t think. And I don’t remember them anyway.”
The cast of characters you’ll meet continues to grow and grow with each act. Joining Conway and Shannon are Ezra, a boy with a giant eagle for a brother who is dealing with the fact that he may or may not have been abandoned by his parents, Johnny and Junebug, two former mining androids turned traveling musicians, Clara a theremin player who is headed to Nashville but also puts on an impromptu concert on the steamboat the Mucky Mammoth, and of course the ever-elusive Weaver Marquez. Johnny and Junebug’s introduction to the group is a particular highlight in the story. While much of KRZ settles for static and ambient background noise, the choose your own song that Junebug performs in a dive bar is nothing short of breathtakingly beautiful, both in the musical composition, and the ethereal beauty of watching her literally blow the roof off the place. After Conway’s truck breaks down on the side of the road, Johnny and Junebug stop and offer to help the group out- with a catch. In exchange for the androids fixing the truck, Conway and co. must follow them to the Lower Depths, a run-down dive bar where the bartender has made a deal with the devil to keep the place open and running. You know, he did have to make a deal with the boys down at the Hard Times Distillery….
Junebug’s performance in Act III stands alone as perhaps one of my favorite moments in any video game EVER. Her and Johnny discuss beforehand that they play Too Late to Love you Now, each time not being entirely certain what the song is about, much in the same way that you as the player are getting more of a feeling and a vibe while playing this game. It’s a beautiful moment of surrealism watching the roof fade away,
her clothes change from a biker outfit into a blue ball gown, hearing that synth pump away in the background and realizing that you are writing this song as it unfolds. The choices you make never really matter, just as in any other point. This is a moment you simply glide through, perfectly capturing the feeling that has been slowly bubbling away in the background of this entire game, only for it to fully erupt from the surface in Act III. Do yourself a favor, play this moment on the biggest screen possible, late at night with the lights turned all the way down and just sink into whatever seat you’ve pulled up. It’s a moment I will literally never forget.
It seems nearly impossible to fully sum up every single bit and piece of Kentucky Route Zero. With so many memorable characters, music tracks, and writing it seems almost undignified to write about it in such an incomplete manner, but here I still sit. I’d never felt more compelled to immediately jump into getting my thoughts onto a page than I did tonight after finishing my second playthrough of this game. It’s a masterpiece. There is no other way to describe it, but even that still feels like a description that falls far short of what this game is. Kentucky Route Zero is a game that will get into your head, and under your skin, and its one that I will be thinking about for a long, long, long time. There isn’t often that you’re around to experience a piece of media that re-writes the definition of the thing that it’s a part of, but Kentucky Route Zero comes pretty damn close.
