Kentucky Route Zero (2013)

I saw a lot of positive reviews about this game so I expected another hidden indie gem among among the soulless blockbusters. Unfortunately there was no game, but a lot of text. I don't mind reading interesting stories, too bad it just wasn't one of it.

I mostly liked the first act, after that everything felt absolutely meaningless. Some people compare this game to Lynch's movies and I see why, but watching his movies far more entertaining than playing this game. I was really bored reading all that uninteresting dialogues.

The visual style and sound / music are great though. The final act looks amazing and the game had few nice songs I enjoyed.

I wished that I loved this game a great deal more than I did. On the surface, it seemed right up my alley: stripped down visuals, a strange environment, and a focus on story and character interaction over gameplay. Games that strike all those notes typically resonate with me (a comparable game I adored was Oxenfree, though KRZ is concededly much less narrative-driven). Unfortunately large swathes just didn't click with me.

Some of the acts and interludes were much weaker than others (undoubtedly an artifact of the staggered development schedule). In particular, I found "The Entertainment" extremely tedious (a great disappointment given my love of both video games and theatre). Specific quibbles aside, though, I think the game has a more pervasive narrative problem, falling in the awkward borderland between strictly linear and completely player-authored. KRZ's story is almost entirely on rails and player interaction comes from selecting dialogue options and guiding conversations. In that way, the player can (to some extent) express key elements of characters' backstories and shape their personalities but can have no impact on the overall narrative arc. Ultimately, I found that balance unsatisfying --I felt as though I was generating endless threads that did never weaved into the overall tapestry. In the weaker portions of the game, it felt like an exercise in pointlessness.

All that said, there is much this game does very well. I loved the simple but striking visual design (which grew more elaborate but remained beautiful in later acts) and the lovely bluegrass-infused music. I also really enjoyed the creative and pervasive strangeness of KRZ's world. And, most importantly, many of the games narrative and character moments did move me. In particular, I really adored Act V of the game, which I thought had some excellent and touching dialogue. Scanning other reviews of the game, that seems an unpopular opinion, likely because Act V leaves plenty of story threads unresolved. However, I thought Act V was a great thematic resolution: in the build-up to a simple but beautiful act of saying goodbye, many of the game's emotional threads (reckoning with loss and loneliness; finding hope in an imperfect and often tragic world) were well brought together.

On the whole, even though this game did not entirely work for me, it's wonderful to see developers take such unique artistic swings in video games. As such, I think this game is well worth checking out and supporting.

Critics' Score:

Metacritic: 88/100

Game Informer: 8.5/10

EDGE: 9/10

Gamespot: 9/10

IGN: 8/10

This game is unique, and to spare you from my unfruitful attempt at describing it, I will leave some pictures as testament of its beauty:

At the beginning of Kentucky Route Zero, one might believe to be before one of too many attempts at trying to imitate a movie by David Lynch, whose style and movies are so unique, that in cinema -and art- his name can be used as an adjective: "lynchian". However, in a surprising way, this game quickly evolves into its own thing, and it turns out to have one of the most thought out stories I have ever seen in the medium. It even elevated its genre, the point-and-click narrative adventure, into its own territory as well. Visually, as the pictures prove, is quite unique, in the sense that I cannot think of any game done with such style; I imagine that this style won't be everyone's cup of tea, but to dismiss it or categorize it as an average game, would be a mistake.

Sure, the game has its flaws, being structured between 5 acts and 5 interludes; the acts offer the most linear and formal point-and-click experience, and I found them to be the parts where this game's fluctuates the most, between boring and intriguing, between bad and good. However, if you were to play the game and decided to skip the "interludes", you'll be doing yourself a disservice, for two reasons: one, they are vital to getting a deeper meaning into the strange happenings of the main story; and two, they are where the game is at its best, at its most experimental and simply where all the juice is.

For this game's writers have gone deeper than what, usually game writers dare to go. In a way that it's very "lynchian" this game might be understood better at a second playthough, once you are more acquainted with the story, so you can go and look into the finer details. The reason that I've arrived to such conclusions, is by looking at this game influences: cinematic from Lynch to Citizen Kane; but what's even more surprising is how much of an influence theatre and its theorists have been: there are mentions of Maxim Gorky's social-realist masterpiece The Lower Depths and Antonin Artaud, creator of the "Theatre of Cruelty", is also mentioned or quoted several times.

This and the game's heavy metaphors, observation of the American working-class under its brutal Capitalism and just overall complex narrative, have left me with the impression that I have only scratched its surface. That being said, some of the Acts remain extremely weak, specially when the interludes offer a much more interesting and innovative design and after the 3rd Act, they become perhaps, the most interesting offerings this game has to deliver.

Score: 87/100

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. (10/10)

I recommend this game only to those who are a fan of symbolism in art, those who enjoy finding meaning in pretty much everything. For the ordinary audience, like me, nothing in this game makes sense. The beginning was good, the characters seemed fine, the art style was original, the score and sound effects and the occasional voice overs were professionally done, and there was a healthy dose of weirdness which would arouse your sense of curiosity. But the game kept getting weirder and weirder, without anything ever being explained for God's sake.

The dialogues are EXTREMELY long, boring, and meaningless. The gameplay is not good either. The only gameplay mechanics are walking and choosing between dialogue options, which gets hellishly boring and repetitive too soon. And the story cannot save the day either because it does not make any sense after some point. I have had enough by the end of Act III and skipped most of the dialogues in Act IV, because I simply lost interest in pretty much everything in the game. I hope the developers explain at least some things in the upcoming Act V. But up until then, I do not recommend Kentucky Route Zero; it just isn't worth $25.

Cross-posting my review that I also posted on Steam:

Man, I tell you what. I played through the entirety of all 3 currently-available episodes on a cold, rainy, New Year's Day 2015, and it was the perfect companion to such a day. Each episode gets progressively more serene, surreal, and...satisfying.

It's not a spoiler to say this, but: the dialog choices you make have virtually no impact on the eventual outcome of the story. But that's okay, because the flavor they add is fantastic. They all add to your own personal narrative for the game.

Bonus #1: The music is amazing (especially the songs with vocals). And they're all available for free, right there in the install directory of the game.

Bonus #2: Be sure to check out the 3 interludes that they released between episodes. They're free downloads from the official website, and add even more color and background to an already great experience.

Tl;dr: just buy this, and play it. Don't do the whole 'I'll just wait until all the episodes are out' thing.