This review contains spoilers
Kentucky Route Zero is a work of art, abundant with thematic meaning for the player to interpret freely.
It's clear very early on that you likely will never reach your destination in this game, which turns the focus to what the intention is behind that creative choice. The magical realist storytelling puts in question what the nature is of the reality you find yourself in. Route Zero itself is a loop in something of another dimension, reached and navigated by preternatural means. The first thing you find in that surreal place is an odd bureaucracy carrying out the vague and mundane work of "reclamation" of disused places. The other tangible point of interest on the route is a massive storage facility for their paperwork. And yet there is wonder everywhere, small bends in the fabric of reality. What are we supposed to make of all this?
Thematically it is about the search for meaning-- that is, the search itself. Many characters enter the story, and the game at a critical point untethers you from who you think "you" are, from that point having you control and select dialogue options from an array of present characters across its many setpieces. Who you are, who they are, the nature of reality itself, these things are always in flux, and due to your ability to choose from an assortment of contradictory dialogue options at certain points as well, the nature of the individuals themselves and their motivations are even subject to fluid change and interpretation. So what is constant here? The presence of these people, the presence of motivation and destination, the presence of their pasts they carry with them as they go.
It's a story colored by a profoundly deep sense of loss, yet dulled in the way only those who have experienced great loss can know. An almost throwaway line in the last act stopped me in my tracks, "Wouldn't it be nice to be around at the start of something, for a change?". I felt it summarized the whole experience, of people always in the middle of something or picking up pieces in the aftermath.
Though the purgatorial themes of the story are clear and present, the more I played the more I came to a message that put a different perspective on it. See, there are throughout the game ends that are not ends, continuations that are not continuations, explanations that can't be satisfied and satisfactions unexplained. Very much a purgatory, but the other side of it is that there isn't abject misery. Even if the conditions for misery are expressed by the characters as something they've experienced or that exist within living memory, it's not here. A thought started forming for me as I neared the end of this experience, that this really is something of a paradise, and for paradise to exist you don't need the presence of heaven, just the absence of hell. That there may be endings, but as long as these people continue onward, as long as they have something in their sights and experiences to have, there is a future, always a single unbending beam of hope.
It's clear very early on that you likely will never reach your destination in this game, which turns the focus to what the intention is behind that creative choice. The magical realist storytelling puts in question what the nature is of the reality you find yourself in. Route Zero itself is a loop in something of another dimension, reached and navigated by preternatural means. The first thing you find in that surreal place is an odd bureaucracy carrying out the vague and mundane work of "reclamation" of disused places. The other tangible point of interest on the route is a massive storage facility for their paperwork. And yet there is wonder everywhere, small bends in the fabric of reality. What are we supposed to make of all this?
Thematically it is about the search for meaning-- that is, the search itself. Many characters enter the story, and the game at a critical point untethers you from who you think "you" are, from that point having you control and select dialogue options from an array of present characters across its many setpieces. Who you are, who they are, the nature of reality itself, these things are always in flux, and due to your ability to choose from an assortment of contradictory dialogue options at certain points as well, the nature of the individuals themselves and their motivations are even subject to fluid change and interpretation. So what is constant here? The presence of these people, the presence of motivation and destination, the presence of their pasts they carry with them as they go.
It's a story colored by a profoundly deep sense of loss, yet dulled in the way only those who have experienced great loss can know. An almost throwaway line in the last act stopped me in my tracks, "Wouldn't it be nice to be around at the start of something, for a change?". I felt it summarized the whole experience, of people always in the middle of something or picking up pieces in the aftermath.
Though the purgatorial themes of the story are clear and present, the more I played the more I came to a message that put a different perspective on it. See, there are throughout the game ends that are not ends, continuations that are not continuations, explanations that can't be satisfied and satisfactions unexplained. Very much a purgatory, but the other side of it is that there isn't abject misery. Even if the conditions for misery are expressed by the characters as something they've experienced or that exist within living memory, it's not here. A thought started forming for me as I neared the end of this experience, that this really is something of a paradise, and for paradise to exist you don't need the presence of heaven, just the absence of hell. That there may be endings, but as long as these people continue onward, as long as they have something in their sights and experiences to have, there is a future, always a single unbending beam of hope.