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."
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."