Kentucky Route Zero is a game about liminal spaces. Cardboard Computer's surrealist masterpiece finds its characters in search of things that may or may not exist. In the most literal sense, what they are looking for is the Zero, a hidden highway where our hero Conway is scheduled to make his final antique delivery to 5 Dogwood Drive. However, Conway and his cohorts' adventure is far more existential than the mere exploration for a mysterious address. Like the Zero, which exists somewhere between real and unreal, each of KRZ's heroes find themselves adrift between two states of being—life and death, employment and unemployment, companionship and loneliness. Their odyssey through a post-recession Kentucky, itself belonging to a space between the prosperity of the super-rich and the poverty of the working classes, finds them in search of something that will ail this liminality. What that is, however, even they don't seem to know. What is it that makes 5 Dogwood Drive so important? Maybe at this address they hope to locate the American Dream, or even the meaning of life, both of which are equally as elusive as the lost highway they are in pursuit of.

Reviewed on Oct 27, 2022


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