so badly want to dispel certain preconceptions of this game--ones set by some who dismiss it ("its a vn with no real agency/choices dont do anything") AND ones set by some who gas it up ("the next great american novel" canonization discourse). so badly want to just talk about the many little optional-to-contend-with details ive come to love in this game that's so dizzingly full of them, interpretative or intertextual or something snuck into the code or otherwise, that i immediately forgive it for not caring much abt how indulgent it must look. so badly want to express the episodic experience as bad and good with the excruciating waits, tantalizing peeks of a world that crosses the boundary of the game space into other mediums and irl, and having a closer understanding of a work that changes from part to part, on an almost exponential scale, with the shifting priorities and moods of the creators--and the ideology of obsolescence that extends to both unity as an engine and the game's themes and perceived relevance--over time. and so badly want to talk about my own cowriting of this story that became a mirror into myself; fear of genetic alcoholism, anxieties on separation between "work" and "hobby", the shame of guillibly falling into something i couldn't really foresee but well you shouldve, the worry of constantly forgetting, the difficulty of accepting records and archives and memorials as washed away and lost, for me all of these and more are in it. but ky0 sprawls in my imagination so far and wide that its so intimidating, with so much i want to address.

maybe ill just lose any sense of restraint someday and spread out thoughts on the other nine or ten entries of acts/interludes that count as kentucky route zero on this website, because its an anthology of smaller games strung together at its heart and there's something to say about each element on its own. or maybe ill express how much i love the game in an actually useful and productive way instead. but for now ill settle with saying this is my favorite of them all. sometimes i forget why but i only have to go back to it, slowly replaying it all and loving the finale so much more the second time around, and then i remember. i realized why i love games most of all, after forgetting for a while, because of this one.

replayed on switch and imo, pc is the slightly better option if you got one that can handle it. i dont think its that demanding but idk how the complete version's specs are, plus on pc you can "hack" into the save files by opening them in a text editor and see the variables for yourself, becomes another aspect of playing ky0 for me. no idea if other consoles are better or worse.

I'm not from Kentucky, but I've been there. I live in an upper Midwest city where 45 minutes and a good sense of direction can take you from a bustling city center to the middle of nowhere, all rolling hills and tired forests and pocket sized towns, little corporate fiefdoms all teetering on the verge of abandonment, through catastrophe or corporate malfeasance or just plain old neglect. Flyover country, most people call it. The American Ruins, I call it. Urban decay is one thing. Rural decay is another entirely.

Kentucky Route Zero is a game (and yes, it's a game, it could not exist as a novel or a show or a series of slides) mostly about what it's like to exist in a post-2008 rural America, where the jobs have gone overseas and where 40% or more of the people are one disaster or accident away from utter financial ruin. It's a game about driving along the backroads at night, feeling like the only person in the world. It's a game about those dusty summer mornings where golden light trickles through the window panes and makes you forget about how powerless you truly are. Mostly, it's a game about reading dialogue bubbles and deciding how what you read makes you (or the character you happen to be controlling at that specific moment in time) happen to feel about it. There are no boss fights or Big Choices, just the struggle to keep going, to keep living in a society that wants nothing more than to crush you down into dust and pave over the remains to build a new parking lot.

Most dialogue driven games, be they classic adventure games, BioWare style RPGSs or even the recent strain of Telltale games, are based around the art of the possible. Around convincing the player that they truly control the narrative, despite the impossibilities of coding and game design that we all know exist. You can't really do whatever you want in Monkey Island, you can only do the things the game designers programmed you to be able to do. By stripping all of that away, KR0's designers are more interested in the art of the impossible, of taking you to places that have not and will not ever exist, and instead of giving you the same old power fantasy, they remind you that even here, in the realm of the impossible, capitalism can still crush you, and that the only agency you truly have is how you choose to feel about it.

I could talk about the terrific music, or the little experimental segments and how they toy with the concept of identity in a medium literally built around being someone else. I could wax poetic about the wonderful characters and the beautiful places they go and how well written all of it truly is (one of the major players is someone named Marquez, if you were wondering what kind of magical realism we're dealing with, here) but that's not what it makes me feel, that's not the parts of this experience that I'm going to take with me until the day that I die. What I'm going to take from this game are non-euclidean caves filled with buzzing skeletons, the white shadow of a giant bird swooping over darkened roads, the ceiling of a bar exploding out into the night sky, silhouettes of horses bathed in the muted light of a road sign. An old bony dog teetering on down the road, abandoned by the people who were supposed to take care of it but refusing to die, either out of pride or shame or both. Collapsed barns. Abandoned houses. The rubble left over after the collapse of the American Dream.

I'm not from Kentucky, but I've been there. And it's both like and not like Kentucky Route Zero in ways I still couldn't describe here and might not be able to if you gave me a hundred years. What I do know is that this game, this experience, is quite possibly the best piece of American art released in the whole of the 2010s.

"I don't think you can win. They say it's a tragedy on the back of the box."

Um jogo SUPER inteligente...mas para mim talvez um pouco inteligente demais.

"Kentucky Route Zero" não coloca o jogador no controle de um personagem, mas sim no controle das ações, como em uma peça de teatro, o jogador deve dirigir os diálogos e sentimentos dos "atores" em cena.

Tecnicamente e estilisticamente este jogo é impressionante. A música é envolvente e a atmosfera que o jogo cria realmente funciona a todo momento. Infelizmente, a falta de uma narrativa envolvente realmente prejudica o game.

O ritmo super cansativo dos atos/episódios deixa o game maçante, fazendo você perder o interesse nos diálogos/escolhas de diálogos (que são primordiais no jogo). A primeira metade do jogo foi boa mas para mim o game se perdeu após o terceiro ato.

Se você gosta de fazer uma viagem surreal, "Kentucky Route Zero: TV Edition" vai lhe agradar. Se você quer jogar jogos que respeitem seu tempo de jogo, provavelmente não é para você.

I always found myself rushing through games to finish them, but it's surprising how I took my time with Kentucky Route Zero -- absorbing the imagery, architecture, atmosphere, and the journey to Dogwood Drive. Despite watching and experiencing many surreal media and attempting to understand it, Kentucky Route Zero is a strange one since it's without a doubt an experience that wants you to absorb the amazing art direction (the developers of the game being art majors). Moments of the game strangely felt nostalgic, melancholic, and sad despite not understanding what was happening which felt perfect for the type of story Zero is; and will remain one of my favorite experiences in gaming.

Future Tips:
- Watching a playthrough of the game will cheapen the experience of Zero.
- If you have a Netflix subscription, it's free via a mobile app. If Steam & Switch & home consoles, it's usually on sale for an affordable deal.
- Take your time with each Act + Interlude and immerse yourself in its journey.
- No need to rush the journey to Dogwood Drive since it'll tell you where to go.
- Waiting for long intervals to play each Act helps to fully reflect about the experience.
- Enjoy the journey in a dim-light room, with earphones, and fall into the depths of the road to Zero.

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.

Kentucky Route Zero is without a doubt the most pretentious game I have ever played. I would be ok with that, if the plot warranted such pretentions, but unfortunately a lot of the story beats in KRZ didn't really resonate with me. I don't think this game is nearly as deep as gamers think it is. So much ink has been spilled over "the american dream", and I don't think this has anything new or insightful to add about the current state of modern north american life. Yes, capitalism is bad. Yes, most people are forced into indentured slavery due to insurmountable debt. Yes, the system is rotten to the core, and we need to find our own happiness through....the power of friendship. I'm sure all of this would seem groundbreaking if you have never checks notes read a single book in your life, but I have had this story rehashed and retold in every artistic medium over and over again for decades. Also I am still salty about having to sit through a fucking hour long play in this game. The whole thing reeks of something some brutal undergrad student would try to convince me is deep at a house party.

Despite my overall gripes, I can appreciate some of the narrative experimentation this game does pull off. Having a non-static main character is nothing new in games, but switching characters mid-conversation creates an interesting disorientation of self and presents a way to exposit the inner thoughts of characters in a way I haven't seen before. Also, some of the actual gameplay itself is really unique; there are many small moments that stick out, and I found myself consistently caught off guard by small gameplay choices that I will not spoil here. I think that breaking this game up into chapters works ok, but also led to a wildly inconsistent tone that may have worked when playing each chapter years apart, but doesn't really work when playing the game over the span of a week or two.

I sat for two weeks after completing this game before I wrote about it, hoping that mulling it over a bit more would let me draw out more nuance from what I had just engaged with, and hindsight would allow me to appreciate the whole more. Unfortunately, my take on the game hasn't changed much since the credits rolled. I know this game means a lot to a lot of people, and I can understand why, but unfortunately the storytelling didn't resonate with me in any profound way. It's worth playing, as a piece of experimental storytelling, but it's not the decade defining piece of art it has been hyped up to be.

A hard game to describe and an even more difficult one to quantify. What started as something I deeply admired as a murky, occasionally moving exploration of capitalism’s inherent stranglehold on middle to lower class Americans slowly transformed into one of the most consuming and gorgeous works of art I’ve experienced in any medium. With each act, the ensemble growing in number and the mystery increasingly folding in on itself through magical surrealist imagery and an ambient rural atmosphere, I found myself less so questioning the meaning of the thematic poignancy behind these elements and just succumbed to the emotional prowess and tenderness on display. Albeit refreshingly nuanced in these expressions of grief, longing, regret, and so on it’s in the game’s pronounced moments where it shines the most and gives levity to the entirety of the narrative. “Too Late to Love You” may be the iconic standout but playing Xanadu, deconstructing the play in “The Entertainment”, discovering the haunted distillery, and listening to voicemail messages on a barge proved just as profound amongst a dozen or so other cherished sequences.

I’m all the more happy I ended up settling in for what would prove to be an overwhelmingly dense masterwork in storytelling and atmosphere because there were times when the straying gameplay tested my attention span with its meandering conversations and cumbersome movements. Even as I write this review my mind spins with the dizzying tangents this game takes the player on; components unique to this medium solely because of its interactivity. It just can’t be done on film or prose alone. The stunning visual compositions and lush soundtrack are only gravy to what Cardboard Computer accomplishes with their rich screenplay and cleverly nuanced direction. It’s all meant to serve a greater purpose that transcends being a “novel” or a “film” or a “play”, let alone a video game. Its potent fluidity between all of them is what makes it the powerful experience that it is and yet it ultimately pitches its tent as a game.

While it spends its first two acts building up a proper narrative and giving the player a decent amount of lore and character backstory to chew on to push them through, after that brief initiation the game becomes an odyssey-like trek into the waking unknown, culminating in what can only be described as Heart of Darkness but make it tranquil space country vibes (with a dash of unease). A purgatorial journey on the Echo River where the mundane stops along the way unknowingly determine the fate of society as these characters know it, leading to an ethereal apocalyptic landscape where God is an overseeing cat and the player a director to this sweeping game of life. Our choices, neither right or wrong, are about providing context to the jinxed voids presented before us. They have their lives and have made their decisions, however exist to be defined by the player. Maybe those words are nonsense to the uninitiated who haven’t played this or maybe I missed the point but it’s how it made me feel right now.

This is a game that demands patience and rewards those willing to take their time with it. It wants to be felt in a spiritual sense rather than intently understood through an intellectual lens and even then to dissect the game’s many literary, cinematic, theatrical, religious, etc influences and references would probably prove just as fulfilling. This is as much a video game about creating and commodifying art and the futile process behind it all as it is one about studying and making sense of it. Some call it Lynchian in that respect but I’m as much inclined to compare it to the films of Terrence Malick; wandering souls attempting to reason with the reality of death and the emotional toll it takes to wrestle with mortality. It’s amazing how despite containing obvious homage to the original Twin Peaks, Kentucky Route Zero is as much a spiritual precursor to what Lynch would do with The Return. So much of what those 18 hours achieves can be found in here in more ways than one. There’s no future conversation about this medium as an artistic form without these five acts and five interludes somewhere within it. I feel as though a decade or two from now we'll still be trying to catch up.

I'm kind of at a loss for words with this one. At times excruciatingly slow, at others utterly captivating. Always mesmerizingly beautiful, subtly unsettling, and thematically dense. All written with characters and scenes worthy of a Pulitzer.

I found myself initially pulled in by questions about the nature of the world. What was real? What was happening? But eventually, Kentucky Route Zero gently pushes modernistic exploration aside and instead focuses on its themes and how the characters interact with them. The world that surrounds them is simply filled with icons that lend emotional resonance to its themes.

But by engaging with it on its own terms, Kentucky Route Zero is affecting. Absolutely thought-provoking and haunting. And has earned a place at the table alongside the other works of classic Americana.

This is my favorite game of all time as well as arguably one of my favorite novels. It's devastatingly beautiful and vitally necessary. The strong influences of the magical realist, southern Gothic, and postmodern literary traditions make it more of a participant in the broader culture than almost any other video game, but at the same time the way it builds up its world and story collaboratively with the player would only be possible in an interactive medium.

Beyond any of its impressive formal qualities, though, the most important thing about KR0 is the way it talks about the real world and the American South in particular. At the same time compassionate and mournful, full of rage and despair and just a few glimmers of hope, it's one of the most honest and vibrant depictions I've seen across any art form of the way America eats itself alive, and the myriad ways people struggle or give in as they're digested.

When I wept at the end of Act V, I wept for the broken dreams of everyone who has been destroyed by America.

Kentucky Route Zero is in one way a collection of stories intertwined between ghostly caricatures of the past, complicated stressed and living individuals, and government and environmental factors that work in such mysterious and incomprehensible ways to the denizens living underneath and on it that they might as well be supernatural, and which they are shown as within the entire work.
Every Act has interesting messages to tell, and lives to reflect on and shed a tear with. By the time everyone comes together to mourn the end of the journey, each person is fleshed out further than the featureless faces that adorn them would suggest. The game touches on several aspects of a decaying shifting void that is midwest America, whether that be the brainwashing ghastly denizens of corporations that push people into the neverending spiral debt hole they craft, or the old denizens on the high mountain scattered long after their nature project failed with an attachment to a dingy computer program that sounds constant static. There isn't really a single piece in here that feels without purpose or really in the wrong space at all. It is dense, certainly a less explicit piece than most, and a large amount of factors that make up the whole are something that it intentionally encourages you to research on your own. Each dialogue in their own points to several meta and thematic factors that don't just have to do with the characters at the receiving end of each line.
The visuals and music are just as thematically placed, each a perfect painting and screenshot in of itself. A lot of work was put into matching the perspective of the characters and where the camera is placed. A few specific examples that stand out to me is the revolving passage of time in Act 5, as a cat hearing everyone mourn and discuss where they're going, or the overbearing perspective when you move about the Hard Times. Or my favorite part, The Entertainment, as you bounce between each painfully depressing line.
I won't claim to understand all of what I saw as I played through the game, and honestly there are a lot of things that are too subtle for me to catch on, or maybe I'm just not in tuned enough to just get it. But that's fine. It's still a masterpiece of the medium, something I wish to see considered in high regard for the recognizable future. I hope it inspires people as much as it teaches me on aspects of life I've never been a part of or could directly relate to. It's a perfect encapsulation of what it sets out, and I was very emotionally invested. I highly recommend getting Kentucky Route Zero.

Beaten: Nov 26 2021
Time: 11 Hours
Platform: Switch

Between this and Disco Elysium, I feel a new maturity in games writing. Maybe it was always there, but prose like this has never gotten such attention before. Kentucky Route Zero confidently steps away from the puzzles that define the point and click adventure genre, opting instead to put its knotty intellectualism squarely in the written word. More simply, if you like the kind of books whose language doesn’t give itself to you easily, you’ll like this game.

KRZ is upfront with what it is. The game begins at a gas station shaped like a horse, where you have a meandering conversation with an attendant, talk to your dog, and try to get directions. It takes its time, loads you up with casual symbolism, and sends you on your way. You’ve only got street names for directions, so you’ve gotta look for landmarks and pay attention to where you are. The map isn’t too big, so it’s not too hard, but it does get you immersed in the world in no time.

As a game, it’s just a very simple point and click adventure. You walk around til prompts come up, click on em, and get started reading. It has a strong aesthetic sense, especially in the backgrounds, which are detailed and concrete as often as they’re composed of stark abstract vector graphics. The character models leave a bit to be desired in their simplicity, and personally I feel that a more expressive style might’ve suited the game a bit better, but what’s here is strong and gets everything across well enough.

KRZ is an enormously affecting piece of media. It stirred memories in me, good and bad, every couple of minutes. Sometimes I’d rediscover an old dream, or a newfound anger, or just a vague emotion. If ya like books and feeling things, check it out

The first thing you can do in the game is decide to name your dog, or just decide it's an old traveller following you until the day you are unable to give him treats or his legs give up.
An amazing trip from start to finish, Kentucky Route Zero is the game that made me realize magical realism can be achieved by other communities of the world aside from latinamerica. The bibble belt of USA comes to life in this game, showing you stories of decadence, the hardships of debt and the dehumanization of people thanks to it.
I'm 24 years at the moment of writing this. I can remember the times I have cried since my adolescence, since I was called a crybaby while growing up.
I didn't cry trough many hardships of my life because, I recall, tought that tears are precious things that must be conserved. But this game made me cry. After an encounter with a character that brought up in me the remembrance of the beauty of non-existence and being alive in memory, I realized this game was for me. But then, while I was walking away from it's house, a mesmerizing rendition of You've got to walk (that lonesome valley) by the Bedquilt Ramblers, a band started to produce covers of gospell and bluegrss for this game, I understood that it wasn't just for me, but it would be one of the loves of my life.
This game has made me feel like home. A home that's starting to break down, full of mosquitos and filth, with no water or electricity, but the house you grew up in, with the pets buried in the yard and your gradma's pot boiling while she listens to the radio. A house that will probably cease to exist once you leave, but that during your stay in it will take roots in you

Kentucky Route Zero is... difficult. It feels like an experiment on how much patience a person has. There's something here that may truly be great but my GOD is it long, strenuous, and BORING. By "The Barfly" sequence I tapped out. It's just a modern take on The Grapes of Wrath but with a David Lynch influence. You can pack that down into a 2 hour indie and I'd be happy, but no no no this game's gonna make sure you get it by droning on and on and on. I honestly don't know how this game has such great reviews and accolades because as much as I enjoy the aesthetic and wanted to like this game, the week it took for me to beat this game felt like a whole month.

another instant favourite. i adored the very empathetic, human exploration of varying personal impacts and experiences with capitalism, colonialism, and some of the displacement, dissatisfaction, and need for community as a means to survive that all accompanies these systems.

the haunting surrealism was more grounded in everyday reality than many other things i've encountered in media. i doubt there is anything truly like this game, visual novel, interactive fiction... however you'd like to describe it, the story feels incredibly intimate and it's worth your time. (as long as you, too, are happy to immerse in its meditative and dreamlike atmosphere)

honestly, my review of citizen sleeper, my now very much loved second favourite, fits here too. although, i feel the two games are quite different - kentucky route zero is far more gentle and consistent in its delivery yet left a deeper, yet more mundane, emotional impact on me because of its grounding in everyday life and loneliness. the review:

'the sort of game that leaves a deep ache in your chest; incredibly human and embodied, heartbreaking, woven with hope and compassion - the sort of writing i will never forget'

kentucky route zero left me with tears in my eyes and the reminder of how deeply i love being alive and having the possibility to build beautiful things with others

<3

One cannot live on vibes alone. Getting 3-4 hours into a narrative focused adventure game and finding the narrative still doesnt have any hook or tension, whilst also being very deliberately slow as hell, basically leaves me 2 acts in with nothing in the narrative keeping me interested.

Yeah the aesthetic is great and the dialogue system is good. And I get the appeal of the game's setting and what it's going for.

I dont think it helps that I think the adventure/puzzle gameplay segments are outright bad. There's nothing compelling in them at all and they go at about half the pace they should do.

If you want an Americana story focused adventure game with cool dialogue play the Missing.

The only video game that holds the prestigious honor of making me fall asleep while playing it, not once, but three separate times.. I’ve nodded off in other games but I straight up fell asleep, controller in-hand, playing Kentucky Route Zero. I cannot stress enough how boring the actual act of playing this video game is. Which is a bummer because I liked the characters and thought the story had potential.

The game started off walking the line between intrigue and taking itself way too seriously before toppling head-first into pretension. I really just do not think this game is for me in any capacity. It feels more like an experimental art piece than anything else. I honestly think this could have made a trippy and very interesting HBO series.

+ Terrific art direction and generally just wonderful art style
+ Phenomenal sound design
+ Great original music. Seriously some of my favorite parts of the game.

- Holding a controller in your hand and hitting buttons to play this video game is incredibly boring
- So much reading. It’s all reading. First time that's ever bothered me.
- Is this a video game?

Painfully pretentious, with a healthy side of slow pacing, weak characterization, and a nonsensical 'story' if it can even be called one. The very worst aspects of 'magical realism' all rolled into one package.

It almost feels like some sort of inside joke where the people calling this a masterpiece are just pranking the rest of us by saying there's a deep and moving message here and that we 'just didn't get it'. A story doesn't need to be blatant, but at a certain point esoteric brilliance and vapid nothingness end up being indistinguishable from one another.

For the last year since playing this wonderful, wonderful, game there was an absence of words to capture what made it so special. Perhaps it was the way it dealt with humanity, or the little moments of pain and loss, or the way it depicts moral, mental, and financial debts. Maybe it was its fantastic soundtrack with a folksy and otherworldly feel. In the end, I think I have just been overthinking what makes this game so special. Kentucky Route Zero is a game about a delivery to Dogwood Drive, not about where you are going but the journey there.

You are this story's curator piecing together the lines of a play as it is performed live in front of you. There will be times in this story where you control every line of dialogue and times in which you contribute very little. Still, that is but minutiae of the moments. The game at its best will invest you bring you into a moment and let it ruminate. These moments are shared by a disparate group of travelers all heading in the same direction for one reason or another. What begins with Conway and hit old mutt grows into a group of people held together for reasons even they cannot put words to. It seems that while chance encounters brought them together they are bound by loneliness. The relationship they share is not unlike those who stumble thei way into the acquaintanceship of others and eventually become friends, sometimes even family. We all need people, sometimes two people come upon one another at the exact right moment to form a bond. Even if that bond is only for a little while.

The thing Kentucky Route Zero captures best is the little moments of mundanity we all live through. For as ethereal and distant as some elements of Kentucky Route Zero are it remains an honest capturing of life. With its every line and stage action hurtling the player towards a finale less grand than it is bittersweet as much of life often is. These moments string together forming a complex web of stories that define us. These plain moments end up on display for thoughtful reflection, much like residents homes are snapped up and displayed in the games Museum of Dwellings. For characters such as Conway, this can see something as minor as a leg injury come to define his life. We don’t often think about how these little insignificant things come to shape our entire worlds. Still, they do, there is no turning back the clock or answer to the ‘what if’ questions we might ask. We do our best to continue life, waking up getting out of bed and going about our business as if it were the most important thing in the world whether we stop by the barber after work or put it off that one more day.

Kentucky Route Zero is about being set back. For Conway, his injury does more than simply delay the delivery to Dogwood Drive. It sets him onto a path of no return in which medical and moral debt consume him. After years of fighting against alcoholism and trying to keep going, keep pushing for those who he had hurt he gives in. Conway is lost, what is left in the aftermath is a nameless man lost to his own vices, settling for a life unlived. It wasn’t just capitalism that killed Conway, but his own waning resilience in the face of an uncaring monolith. That story is just one of a handful reflecting on American decay. The loss of life and family in the service of greed and labor. For his traveling companion’s loss is not unfamiliar, still, they remain, for a time, resilient against the crashing of a wave against their shore. For a young boy like Ezra, it could be his innocence will remain despite all that he has lost but the world often takes more than it can give. What is to become of him, or the others, is left up to us. We are all just keepers of a flame. If we nurture it, it will grow and keep us warm. If we do not, if we let the waves of life wash it away we too will lose ourselves in the torrent.

Kentucky Route Zero is about moving ahead. In the face of an unrelenting sea, we are then too asked the question, why keep going. Kentucky Route Zero shows us time and time again what we do in the face of loss. Grief too is just a moment in our lives like any other. It fades over time before inevitably returning like an old friend. Like many of its themes, Kentucky Route Zero lays bare grief and trauma. There is loss and death and yet they continue onward. Even in the carnage, some find hope, where something is empty there is an opportunity to fill it. To make it a home for friends and family to come together. Even if for a short time. What comes after that? Well, more mundanity. While one town might be suffering the worst storm in a generation another might be featuring the debut play of an aspiring playwright. The world is rarely this binary but Kentucky Route Zero in all its mysticism allows itself to be as simple or as complex as its messages need it to be.

We often find ourselves adrift in the sea without guidance or purpose. Still, we find our own guidance in time. From simple goals to big dreams were are aided by our friends, family, and even strangers. They help us along the way and eventually we find our own place in the world. Stories such as Kentucky Route Zero are rare in that they capture these elements and distill them so elegantly they stick with us. Even if we cannot put words as to why. I hesitated, trying to find the words to describe Kentucky Route Zero. “The next great piece of classic American literature?” with some grandiose idea of what words could justify the importance of this game. Nonetheless, thinking more about Kentucky Route Zero it stuck with me that there need not be some elaborate story to put to this game. After all, others have certainly captured the spirit of the game better than I could. It is, for a remarkable difficult world, another piece of literature that brings us into its stories if only for a moment to better understand the world and ourselves.

The word masterpiece gets thrown around a lot with games, but with Kentucky Route Zero that description is apt. The writing is some of the best that gaming has to offer; effortlessly profound, taking you on a journey that never goes where you'd expect and that lingers long after it's over. The world is like a dream, and yet it feels so tangible.

Everything from the story, the characters, the art, and the soundtrack crashes together to point to the game's themes. It's a special thing to behold, a creative at the top of their game like this. For days after the end of the final act I was just in awe of everything I had experienced. There will never again be anything quite like my time on the Zero.

Kentucky Route Zero is a haunting dour game that has some truly stunning moments backed with some really great music. The only problem is that the weird obtuse-ness of it's style can bleed over into the gameplay being tedious and a chore to get through.

On longer playthroughs, the walls of text and strangeness can get grating and a slog to read through. It is a truly bold and interesting game though that is still worth trying for the experience, the moments of this game that are an absolute home run are worth getting to if a David Lynch visual novel appeals to you in any sort of way.