Kentucky Route Zero: TV Edition

released on Jan 28, 2020

Kentucky Route Zero is a magical realist adventure game about a secret highway in the caves beneath Kentucky, and the mysterious folks who travel it. Gameplay is inspired by point-and-click adventure games (like the classic Monkey Island or King's Quest series, or more recently Telltale's Walking Dead series), but focused on characterization, atmosphere and storytelling rather than clever puzzles or challenges of skill. The game is developed by Cardboard Computer (Jake Elliott, Tamas Kemenczy, and Ben Babbitt), and features an original electronic score by Ben Babbitt along with a suite of old hymns & bluegrass standards recorded by The Bedquilt Ramblers.


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Me ha emocionado bastante el final, y eso que creo que no he entendido ni jota.

A once in a lifetime experience that cannot be replicated in another art medium

I appreciate what they were trying to do here and I am all for creative dialogue and abstract art. But there is a point when the only structure to this whole game is that the A button works. The dialogue and story is so all over the place that it's hard to take anything meaningful from it. Or perhaps I was too bored to even try to decipher a meaning.

KRZ is an impressionistic, magical realist game about legacy, traditions - the things that are passed down from one generation to the next both in the sense of regular people and the communities that they populate, and of artists and the history and traditions of their schools of art. The game is very aware of its own influences and the wide variety of artistic mediums and traditions that it draws from, it's extremely dense with references and allusions (I caught just enough of them to know that there were way more that went over my head).
KRZ is more interested in being thought-provoking and evocative than it is trying to make any bold declarative statements about the way in which society is constructed or anything like that. In that way I find it very interesting that this game is compared so often to Disco Elysium, a game which had a direct and very materialist political analysis, whereas KRZ is much more descriptive than prescriptive.
It is extremely effective at evoking feelings of loss, decay, and mourning, while always making sure to remind that there is no decay without regrowth. Death and disposal - of people and communities, of artists and their art, even of office supplies (keep an eye out for those cute lil crabs just making the best of what they've got) - is never the end of anything, just another transformation, part of an ever-ongoing conversation echoing back and forth into itself forever. You take what you need and leave the rest.
The headiness, amount of reading required and lack of an immediately gratifying "fun" gameplay loop will probably make a lot of people bounce off of this game, which is a shame, because it's the rare game that truly rewards deeper examination and carries en emotional heft that will have me thinking back to certain scenes, songs and lines for years to come.
A true classic, one of the best games of its size that I've ever played. Just missed being one of my GOAT's, but wouldn't be surprised if later reexamination bumps this game up there for me.

There may never be another game quite like Kentucky Route Zero, but that's fine with me. Just makes it even more special

Stunning gothic dreamscape. Best book about the horrors of capitalism in Americana I've read in a while.

Did I understand half of what was happening? Not at all.