This game is so damn beautiful. Several parts of this chapter manipulate space in interesting ways, playing with expectations of linear paths through geographies and spaces and resisting them. The dialog options can go as expected or can transport the player and character far from the scene. And from start to finish, the locations visited in between the looping Zero and the overworld are fascinating in concept, art, and execution. The final scene of traversal, with Julian, handles flying in a way that calls back to older Final Fantasy games while also offering something new: gazing down at familiar scenes from the sky. This is handled in small snippets of text, but they convey something powerful that other games skip over: a feeling that its characters recognize places in the game’s world, considering their own recent history with them.

Well I think I've made a mistake here!

I split up reviewing KRZ because each episode has spent such a long time between each release it felt sort of fair to review them one at a time (and it gives me a leg up on my 52 game challenge... huehuehue...) but honestly these episodes are so damn SHORT and kinda nothing... They just get rolling and then they end.

Episode 2 starts off with our wounded Conway and Shannon now on the ZERO, but actually at a weird records office that is part of the Zero but also part of the world? Is this like a normal thing because nobody is freaking out yet so I guess we're just cool with things. You move around the odd-ball office (there's a whole floor for Bears. That's bumping this episode up a whole letter grade honestly) and try to track down directions to Dogwood drive... why is he so bent on delivering this thing? Why is Shannon on this trip with me again? I do appreciate her presence though, her dialogue options cut through the bullshit. There's also several amusing remarks about how Conway asks weird and meanderign questions lol... but hey its the games fault for being so weird! I'm just trying to roleplay correctly in this world dammit!

Anyway, then you find a weird motel/museum place after driving on the zero (which was super weird I liked it) and there's a great atmosphere to the place, but then you get abducted by a giant bird and taken to a forest where you meet a doctor who is going to fix up Conway... the end! Yeah that's it. The sequence of running through the forest is a neat way to break up the "slowly meander across this level" you normally have to do and with another 11/10 song performed in the background but... honestly even though its only happened twice, it feels almost perfunctory at this point?

Act 2 has some neat bits to it (the eagle, running through the forest with music, the bears' dept. floor) but nothing really tying it together like the first episode, where both our protagonists are obviously searching for things that aren't in this world anymore. What are we doing this episode? Looking after an old guy with a bum leg?