Kentucky Route Zero review: A point-and-click adventure well worth the wait

Source: Cardboard Computer

Back in 2022, Kentucky Route Nothing was one of the first games I ever wrote about professionally. That piece isn't even online anymore, so I couldn't tell y'all exactly what I said, but I practice remember information technology was a tough endeavour. This game was funded on Kickstarter and sought to release five episodes. There was a lot to say about it, but as well nothing.

It was atmospheric, generally, capturing the pastoral and gloomy color palette that'll carry over into the other episodes — called Acts — forth with the setup for a story involving a truck driver named Conway on his final delivery. To get at that place, he has to observe the Zero, a mysterious highway system that he learns about through a series of ever-increasingly weird and possibly supernatural people. Over the commencement act, he has some strange encounters, introducing the player to how the game will bend the laws of reality in clever, sometimes funny means. Information technology was all fix up for the dream-like globe players would be entering once Conway really got going on the Nothing.

Even so, it was tough to see simply from this starting time episode where Kentucky Road Zero would go over the adjacent decade (along with how it would take vii years to reach Human activity Five). The potential was there from the go-go, but there were yet many questions. What would this game be well-nigh? If you take a expect at the Kickstarter you tin can see what the game was expected to look like. You might notice that quite a few elements — from the art direction to even basic plot details — have changed, and then it was a abiding process even for the developers at Paper-thin Computer.

The company as well couldn't take foreseen that it would be making a game about several dissimilar Americas. Information technology'due south adjacent to incommunicable to have seen where America would be in 2022. As a budding journalist and critic fresh out of higher at that time, I couldn't fifty-fifty begin to embrace where we were headed; how things set upwards before I was born would pave the way for our current economic anxieties; how capitalism would begin to loom even uglier than before, moving away from the banks that caused the Keen Recession of 2008 to Silicon Valley-based tech conglomerates.

In a sense, Kentucky Route Goose egg might exist one of the most critical games of the past decade. It not just shows where America was but as well where it is heading. It may have taken a long fourth dimension to fully reveal itself, but watching the game abound and change over the past vii years has been but as satisfying as playing the game itself in one sitting tin can exist. Players tin certainly bask it in 2022 as a cute and somber verse form about debt, poverty, loneliness, and, eventually, acrimonious hopefulness, just, like Conway on his quest towards a delivery, it's rewarding as a story about journey and movement, rather than the final destination.

Have a journey

Kentucky Route Zero Telly Edition

$25

Bottom line: At that place are few other games like Kentucky Route Zero. The point-and-click/text-based adventure captures the economic anxieties and the loneliness of America in 2022, merely information technology still manages to be hopeful amongst the tragedy. You don't want to miss this.

Pros:

• Somber look into America in 2022
• Gorgeous fine art style
• Haunting music
• Actually nails the landing
• Plays around with interactivity beautifully

Cons:

• Movement tin can be janky

Annapurna Interactive provided Windows Central with an Xbox One lawmaking for the purposes of this review.

Just what is Kentucky Road Zip about?

Source: Annapurna Interactive

Information technology's tough to truly explain what Kentucky Road Zero is without spoiling it because information technology's absolutely worth experiencing without knowing much ahead of time. Here's what I can manage. Information technology's about the aforementioned Conway and the delivery he has to make, but it only grows from there. You lot almost forget near the original goal as you go inundated with more than characters and their stories, more locales, and more than acts of loftier strangeness.

Information technology's tough to truly explain what Kentucky Route Zero is without spoiling it.

I'll give you some examples. In i vignette you have to go up and down a bureaucratic office edifice to detect some information; one of the floors is for the bears. At another moment slightly later on you lot detect yourself in the Museum of Dwellings, which is a museum depicting different dwellings (it'southward in the name) but is also the dwelling of the people those dwellings once belonged to. They all chatter nearly you as you wander around. The Zip itself is an baggy, ever-shifting highway where you have to follow directions like "turn around at the Crystal."

Beyond only the five acts there are also 5 interludes. These shorter stories take place at various points in the Kentucky Route Zero timeline and characteristic a lot of the same characters (many of them focus on a trio you come across early in Act I), but they're more than abstract. Cardboard Computer uses these to play around with the concept of interaction, giving players unlike means to experience them. Ane, equally an example, takes place in a museum installation past one of the characters. You can only walk around in a circle, touching buttons to turn the works of art on, and then you simply accept to sit down and listen or lookout. In another, you are given aught but a telephone and a phone number, which you can telephone call either through the game or on your bodily telephone.

In an interview with USGamer, sound designer Ben Babbitt noted how Kentucky Route Zero feels like "we made 10 different games." While he meant that in response to how long it took to make, information technology does legitimately feel like that. Each act and interlude is continued via characters, theme, and story, but the way each moves is unique. The rules change slightly between each, moving you between just controlling Conway to jumping betwixt a scattering of characters by having you control a cat, for instance.

Source: Cardboard Computer

Information technology all works to create this dreamlike flow, much like the Echo, which is a river you encounter later on in the game. You're following the plot every bit one of the many named characters, but the more you're tasked with inhabiting them and decision-making their deportment, the less you care virtually what yous were doing before. Conway is your gateway character, simply shortly you get to play Shannon, Ezra, Junebug, Johnny, a cat, and and then many others. The goal ready out in the first act becomes a distant memory as you go along, getting lost on the Zippo so the Repeat, prowling for cloak-and-dagger locations to explore, and losing rails of yourself.

There are set points that you need to go to, but in that location are also ways to veer off on your own. The Zippo especially provides a lot of these opportunities thanks to a brochure from the Bureau of Secret Tourism that gives directions to odd places. So while you can consummate each act in an hour or two just by sticking to the important objectives, you tin stretch that out. I've played through some of the early on acts a few times and still found a lot I didn't catch the start fourth dimension.

OK, but what is the game really about?

Source: Cardboard Computer

Kentucky Road Zero wants to hit you where information technology hurts. The writing is on the wall almost immediately every bit to what kind of world you've stepped into. The gas station you start off in is empty and the mine you travel to is abandoned. As you traverse the Zero you see the other signs: this is a world that's dying.

A lot of the people you lot meet are struggling, sometimes in different means. A bar has to make a deal to stay adrift and the people in the museum have to alive in that location because at that place's nowhere else to go. Sometimes the suffering is more nefarious. Two huge powers, the Consolidated Power Company and The Difficult Times Distillery, trap people in countless cycles of poverty and debt while having their easily in a lot of the events of the game. A mine tragedy can be traced back to the power company and the distillery tricks people into servitude, but in that location aren't whatever consequences for either.

The world is filled with people drinking in lieu of doing anything else. Those same people talk a lot about things that have already happened or traditions that have died or memories that they might forget. It's fabricated upward of folks who stick around despite zilch worth looking frontwards to … beyond the possibility that maybe things will alter.

Kentucky Route Zero is sad. It's one of the saddest games I've ever played. It's as well ane of the most impactful. It presents a story that points out clear issues but tin't do annihilation about them. This is a broken system and in that location's no way to set it in five acts. What we tin do is live our relatively small lives and hope for the best.

This is what we bear into the final human action.

Does it stick the landing?

Source: Cardboard Computer

Endings are an integral element of storytelling. A good or bad ending tin can make or intermission the pieces that came before it, then the build-upwards to Kentucky Road Cipher Act Five was both exciting and hesitant. After that long of a wait, tin the final episode live upwardly to expectations? Every bit much equally this is a review well-nigh the game every bit a whole, it's also generally about Act Five, which hit PC and consoles on Jan. 28.

What's almost hitting about this final act is how it both seems like a completely different game than what was presented in Human action I just besides makes perfect sense as information technology is.

In many ways, the concluding act is a reflection of the first. It's one of the shortest since Act I (not counting the interludes), but information technology's likewise the well-nigh meandering with, oddly, the least amount of exploration and discovery. While other acts have the player explore various locales, talk to strangers, or make phone calls, Act V just has you lot playing as a cat who runs around a atypical infinite interacting with the groups of people. It'southward a simple manner to get you out of the heads of the people you've been playing and into a more than objective point of view to experience a ending, just information technology's jarring at commencement. Nevertheless, if you've played the game, this is about normal since it's e'er experimenting with various perspectives and ways to experience it.

And that's virtually information technology. Y'all run around for a while and so it ends. It'due south about the perfect catastrophe.

What's near striking about this final act is how it both seems like a completely different game than what was presented in Act I simply also makes perfect sense as it is. The goals set out past Conway, in the beginning, have completely vanished, washed abroad like a lot of the boondocks y'all've found yourself in. The ending features many conversations betwixt people you've met and others you oasis't. They talk nigh getting upward and starting over, simply peradventure also sticking around. They talk virtually tradition, guilt, and regret; of optimism and hope but besides well-nigh reality and tragedy. In the game's final moments, you lot're forced to stop and listen to a song that both fills you with sorrow and joy. You experience promise for something that might never come.

Kentucky Route Zero doesn't wrap upwardly with a neat bow, but that was never the intention. A game about loss and loneliness among a corrupt and oppressive system was never going to end happily or definitively. Information technology was just going to cease because that'due south what the developers wanted. The player is left with a feeling of emptiness as the game ends, just it'south but open enough that we can expect more. The characters left to hang around in those concluding moments are off to practice god-knows-what but that feels correct. What was once hither may be gone, but at that place's still more out there.

Yous tin can take this literally or metaphorically, for your own life or for the lives of those in the game. It all works the aforementioned way.

Bottom line: Should you play Kentucky Route Zero?

Source: Cardboard Estimator

Considering all the words I've put down about the game, and all the gushing I've washed, the answer should be obvious: yes this is a game I would recommend you lot play. More importantly, it'south a game that needs to be played to be truly believed.

I spent a couple of days playing through Kentucky Route Zero for this review, but spent even longer trying to write it. In that location'due south so much to talk nearly; I oasis't even gotten into the fine art manner, which is simple but striking, or the music, which is haunting and odd, a combination that sums up the mood the game is going for. I didn't fifty-fifty experience comfortable talking near some problems I had with it (like how move can sometimes be janky) because none of information technology mattered enough to mention.

I also didn't know how I totally felt. The game is somber and the feel finishing it isn't satisfying in a typical sense since zero changes. The stories told are still just as total of sorrow as they were before the catastrophe. None of those negative feelings matter in the end, since the tragedy is a part of the indicate. It'due south a reflection of current America'south economic crunch, and information technology'due south filled with all the dread that thinking about the existent globe inflicts.

Yet, it'south an feel that forces you to wonder about a lot — going out into the middle of nowhere and staring at the stars, living your life one pace at a time, yearning to connect with that person behind the cash register at the gas station — and that's something that matters.

Kentucky Route Zero is out now on PC, Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and Nintendo Switch.

Country road

Kentucky Road Nil Goggle box Edition

It was virtually the journeying all along

In that location are few other games similar Kentucky Road Zero. The point-and-click/text-based adventure captures the economic anxieties and the loneliness of America in 2022, but it even so manages to be hopeful amid the tragedy. Y'all don't desire to miss this.

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Source: https://www.windowscentral.com/kentucky-route-zero-review

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