What impresses me most about Kentucky Route Zero is that despite how liberally it borrows many of its best traits from other mediums, it so clearly could only work as a game. In most games, the camera is an object to manipulate and control, a tool to serve the gameplay above all else. KRZ's use of camera takes more cues from films and cinematic technique than the vast majority of its counterparts, where its slow pans, layered zooms and stark scene transitions are calculated, artistic choices, left out of the players' hands and implemented to elicit specific emotional responses or entrench us deeper in the thick atmosphere of its world. The writing is at a strong literary level which doesn't overcome, but is simply not even concerned with the trap many games fall into of using dialogue as exposition crutches to push their stories further. Plot is secondary to mood and atmosphere in the story of KRZ, with its writers placing all focus on novelistic passages that emphasize detail and imagery, meshing well with the mysterious, unexplainable happenings in the world that are presented audiovisually.
What makes it so vital as specifically a game though? Not an easy question to answer, and KRZ is so elusive and oblique that I imagine it means a lot of things to a lot of people. To me, it's about a few key choices related to interaction—the way you occupy multiple characters, write your own story with well-constructed dialogue choices (another subversion here in that again, this informs the way the story feels moment to moment, rather than giving us any actual agency over how it plays out) and immerses you into its most surreal qualities. There's a wonderfully dense thematic tapestry that is carefully weaved throughout the five acts as well; the throughline that sticks out most as I write this is the lack of control we have over our lives and our situations, the way we don't understand so many things swirling around us, beyond us, but often just accept what we're given with a sigh, moving forward, not looking back. Aren't games, at their most basic level, ultimately about control and pushing forward to what lies ahead?
What makes it so vital as specifically a game though? Not an easy question to answer, and KRZ is so elusive and oblique that I imagine it means a lot of things to a lot of people. To me, it's about a few key choices related to interaction—the way you occupy multiple characters, write your own story with well-constructed dialogue choices (another subversion here in that again, this informs the way the story feels moment to moment, rather than giving us any actual agency over how it plays out) and immerses you into its most surreal qualities. There's a wonderfully dense thematic tapestry that is carefully weaved throughout the five acts as well; the throughline that sticks out most as I write this is the lack of control we have over our lives and our situations, the way we don't understand so many things swirling around us, beyond us, but often just accept what we're given with a sigh, moving forward, not looking back. Aren't games, at their most basic level, ultimately about control and pushing forward to what lies ahead?