Kentucky Route Zero was a game that I had first heard about right around the time I made my Backloggd account, and while I never really knew how long it would take for me to actually get around to playing it, I never could have expected me playing it all the way through using the iOS port, of all things. Despite how often I played them as a kid, I've generally dropped mobile games altogether (aside from the occasional redownload of something like Jetpack Joyride for a week-long nostalgia trip) and I've especially avoided the mobile ports of games I'm actually interested in playing due to how shoddy many of them end up being, but since the iOS version of Kentucky Route Zero was free if you signed in with your Netflix account and cost a whopping $24.99 on other platforms, I decided to give it a go on my phone and spent the next few months playing through it. Putting my lack of experience with the point-&-click adventure genre aside, I can't really say I've played anything like Kentucky Route Zero before, and while not all of its decisions worked for me, I still found it to be a beautiful work of art whose moods and themes stayed in my brain whenever I wasn't playing.
Throughout its five acts and interludes, Kentucky Route Zero ends up feeling more like an interactive novel than a traditional video game, and since that exact phrase has been used by many to describe my top two favorite games ever made, this choice ended up working wonders for me. There's this quiet, yet poignant sense of melancholy and loss that can be found in every one of the creative choices here, as the minimalistic artstyle and user interface, naturalistic and often echoey soundscapes, and the few uses of actual music gave all of the environments a ghostly sense of decay. Along with the characters in Kentucky Route Zero all have some layer of tragedy to them, the conversations that they have throughout the game primarily consist of opaque recollections of people, places, and objects that have either disappeared long ago due to company buyouts and bureaucratic hurdles or never even existed to begin with, and having so many of these personal stories mesh together made the game's themes of memories, nostalgia, and the death of Americana at the hands of unchecked capitalism both prevalent within the context of the game's world and relevant outside of it. The strength of the writing in Kentucky Route Zero was just as prevalent in the story's actual structure and beats as it was in the sorrowful dialogue, with the game blending elements of literature, film, and even theatre into its paranormal and often abstract brand of magical realism to create an experience that is as ambitious as it is ever-changing.
Maybe it's because my attention span has been ruined by the more high-octane games I've been playing recently, but despite how fascinating and enthralling I found the ideas of Kentucky Route Zero to be throughout my playthrough, I couldn't actually play it for more than, say, 20 or 30 minutes at a time. In small chunks, this game is great, but longer play sessions of Kentucky Route Zero often left me feeling restless, and since some of the scenes felt outright sluggish in their pace rather than deliberate like the rest of the game, I found myself cutting my sessions short just to allow myself to appreciate the game more when I came back later on. The intervals were also a bit of a mixed bag for me, because while some of them were very effective, others were either too short to have any real impact or went on for too long without saying anything new, and I do wish that they were a bit more consistent overall. Kentucky Route Zero also features a final act that essentially boils down to running around in a circle and hoping that an interactable person or object would actually spawn in, and since they only appeared about 50% of the time for me, I had to quit out and restart this section multiple times just to get it to work properly. Kentucky Route Zero is not a perfect game in my eyes, but it's still brilliant and evocative in everything that it does well, and I'm really interested in seeing what Cardboard Computer has up their sleeve in the future.
Throughout its five acts and interludes, Kentucky Route Zero ends up feeling more like an interactive novel than a traditional video game, and since that exact phrase has been used by many to describe my top two favorite games ever made, this choice ended up working wonders for me. There's this quiet, yet poignant sense of melancholy and loss that can be found in every one of the creative choices here, as the minimalistic artstyle and user interface, naturalistic and often echoey soundscapes, and the few uses of actual music gave all of the environments a ghostly sense of decay. Along with the characters in Kentucky Route Zero all have some layer of tragedy to them, the conversations that they have throughout the game primarily consist of opaque recollections of people, places, and objects that have either disappeared long ago due to company buyouts and bureaucratic hurdles or never even existed to begin with, and having so many of these personal stories mesh together made the game's themes of memories, nostalgia, and the death of Americana at the hands of unchecked capitalism both prevalent within the context of the game's world and relevant outside of it. The strength of the writing in Kentucky Route Zero was just as prevalent in the story's actual structure and beats as it was in the sorrowful dialogue, with the game blending elements of literature, film, and even theatre into its paranormal and often abstract brand of magical realism to create an experience that is as ambitious as it is ever-changing.
Maybe it's because my attention span has been ruined by the more high-octane games I've been playing recently, but despite how fascinating and enthralling I found the ideas of Kentucky Route Zero to be throughout my playthrough, I couldn't actually play it for more than, say, 20 or 30 minutes at a time. In small chunks, this game is great, but longer play sessions of Kentucky Route Zero often left me feeling restless, and since some of the scenes felt outright sluggish in their pace rather than deliberate like the rest of the game, I found myself cutting my sessions short just to allow myself to appreciate the game more when I came back later on. The intervals were also a bit of a mixed bag for me, because while some of them were very effective, others were either too short to have any real impact or went on for too long without saying anything new, and I do wish that they were a bit more consistent overall. Kentucky Route Zero also features a final act that essentially boils down to running around in a circle and hoping that an interactable person or object would actually spawn in, and since they only appeared about 50% of the time for me, I had to quit out and restart this section multiple times just to get it to work properly. Kentucky Route Zero is not a perfect game in my eyes, but it's still brilliant and evocative in everything that it does well, and I'm really interested in seeing what Cardboard Computer has up their sleeve in the future.
JezzatheJenius
3 months ago