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.

Really special and diferent game. One of the few real tries of videogames to move in a kind of arthouse field.

The problem is that as an example arthouse cinema by itself it's not good or bad (if you are not a cinemateque hipster). Since you have many options in cinema to find that you don't value it just for what it tries or diferentiates with others.
In videogames since there are so few you could make the mistake of overpraising KRZ because of praising its diferences and intentions, even if at the end they aren't that well done.

KRZ has a real problem with rhythm, I love taiwanese slow cinema, Marienbad and many things like that, but KRZ has a dead rhythm, not a style decision but a lack of emotion or beauty behind wandering and really repetitive structure and scenes that end feeling extremely tiresome.

Also despite all its virtues as it advances KRZ starts to become too soft, too slow, too hipster. Because years pass and society shifts towards this mentality of being fragile and praising fragility, always under powerful emotions, passion and those feelings not in vogue at all at this moment.

What are the good things? The road scenes are very soothing, many moments of pure beauty of discovery of diference with what one is accustumed in videogames and wished could be found more frequently; but above all the scene at the pub in act III with the song is one of the most beautiful moments I've experienced in a videogame, amazing moment, very touching and aethereal.

Kentucky Route Zero is like a journey through all the Midwestern parts of my mind. I'm originally hail from Michigan, and though I haven't been back in some time this game felt all too familiar. I've spent tons of time driving through that part of the country, through Southern Ohio and through Kentucky, and all the strange characters and people you meet in Kentucky Route Zero strangely felt like... home. The sad old man at the gas station, the homely people along the riverboat's path, and the quirky people at the late night TV station, they all just feel... like people you've met. While I can't even begin to describe a lot of the themes of KRZ because quite frankly, I don't understand all of them, the solitude and loneliness enveloped in this game was strangely cathartic to experience. I don't know if you could give it a genre outside of "point-and-click surrealism," which is fine because that's simply what it is.

You embark on a journey to deliver for the antique shop your character works for and quickly find yourself off all semblance of a beaten path. While the story is great, the visuals even greater, one thing that stood out to me was the soundtrack which features some great ambient works but also a few harrowing bluegrass and synth based vocal songs that will remain engrained in my brain for quite some time.

THE FUCKING TOO LATE TO LOVE YOU PERFORMANCE oh my GODDDDD!!!!!! i got GOOSEBUMPS!!!!

by the way i recommend to anyone who freaked out like me to read the Ben Babbitt (Junebug) FACT mag interview on writing the score for the game ~ they honestly seem like such a cool person & i had to buy junebug’s bandcamp album afterwards!

(also watch junebug’s 360° music video for “static between stations” —youtube link)

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.

Created by just three people over the span of nearly a decade, this indie point-and-click adventure finally wrapped up with its fifth chapter. Kentucky Route Zero is a dialogue-driven narrative experience with a bit of puzzle-solving but mostly just walking through the environments and guiding the story constituting the gameplay. It is not the kind of story that can be taken literally, with strange detours and unexplained phenomena pervading throughout the adventure.

I didn't find myself liking it much as I played, as I failed to grasp much of the story's meaning. However, the game's quiet ambiance and curious musings have stuck with me in the weeks that have followed me completing it. It was interesting to see the cast of characters grow overtime, from its lonely truck driver Conway and his dog, to a ragtag band of travel companions, until eventually you'll be experiencing a whole community. It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, but Kentucky Route Zero strikes a fascinating tone of haunting loneliness but also of peaceful resignation. The characters never seem weirded out by their increasingly surreal circumstances, but simply accept them as they are, accepting things as characters often do in a dream.

Between the episodes (which tend to be about 90 minutes each) are short interludes which at first feel entirely disconnected from the general plotlines, but always ended up tying in. Sometimes you might learn more about a location's past, or a periphery character’s backstory.

One of the game's biggest strengths is its presentation. The minimalistic art style works really well, as it allows the player to fill in the details using their imagination. The soundtrack from Ben Babbitt is haunting and quirky and makes great use of different styles. I especially liked the in-game folksy song performances, of which there is at least one per episode.

While Kentucky Route Zero lets you shape details of the backstory with dialogue options, it never makes a difference in the general throughline of its tale. I could see this game being completely alienating to many players. Outside of the obtuse and surrealistic storyline, you'll have to put up with slow-paced clunky controls, and the occasional moments where the directions on where to go in the game's open-world travel map aren't clear, which is frustrating. Despite its faults, there are still moments of this weird little experience that I won't soon forget.

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?

Lo rural se da de la mano con el realismo mágico, surrealismo y experimentalidad sumado a una toma de decisiones que, cualesquiera que sean nuestras decisiones, nos conduce, inevitablemente, al mismo camino: ser devorados por el entorno. Pero al menos podemos decidir cómo construimos nuestros vínculos en un mundo de imperioso destino y cuáles decidimos que sean nuestros recuerdos. Y lo decidimos por unos personajes ciegos y ambiguos que afrontan la vida de la única manera que saben: mirando al futuro, juntos.

'Kentucky Route Zero' es una obra maestra con una capacidad descomunal para hacernos sentir, con ecos de Márquez, Magritte o Lynch -entre muchos otros-, entramando un libreto de teatro en cuya función somos espectadores y ejecutores en tiempos difíciles.

I once began this game in 2020 and stopped playing after only a couple hours of gameplay. It was not yet the right time for me - this game can feel like a heavy weight at times. I am so glad I gave it another shot.

Though this game is much more than a visual novel, if you generally do not enjoy reading books then this game is not for you. Much of the game play time is spent reading text without an animation or visual to support it. For me, this is alright as I am someone who felt immersed enough by reading the dialogue and narration. Some will disagree, that is fine.

Aside from that barrier that people seem to encounter, this game is a phenomenal experience front to back. At first I was frustrated by the fact that the game would introduce something fantastical and strange but not explain it's meaning. Much is left up to the interpretation of the player. But once I got used to the magical nature of the game, I was able to let go of trying to take things too literally.

The dialogue options and art direction are a real achievement from the developers - though the art assets are simple in design, they suit the game's atmosphere. I absolutely adored when the canonical folk songs would bleed through from the background. By the end I was totally invested in the characters and was left with a strong impression.

Not often do games manage to be poetic without risking their maturity. KRZ is as sophisticated as it is innovative. Highly recommend it.