I feel at home again.

I know I have said that before, typically about games that contain a slice of something strangely personal. A feeling, never concrete, that can be best described as familiarity. A brief moment during which every sense and every feeling I have agree that everything is just right. That I belong in this spot at this exact moment. That's what feeling home is like. Knowing that everything has settled just the right way that nothing feels unfamiliar anymore.

I feel that way when I stand on a little hill not far from my home in Hateno Village. The wind blows gently past me, and there might even be a bit of rain on the horizon. It's likely the late afternoon, maybe dusk, and the serene sounds of the wind flowing along the hills into the valley below hits me with a gentle reminder that I could stay here forever.

I experienced that feeling again when playing Outer Wilds. Usually when the sun is expanding and I have only a few seconds left. Although fleeting, that moment simultaneously stretches out forever and I am me, consumed by a super nova, endlessly. It's melancholic but also beautiful, because moments later I will start my journey all over again. And despite being worlds apart, it shares strange a commonality with the hills of Hateno. Each might be a different location, a different game, experiences embodied in different imagined bodies, but they are both and always home.

I found my home in Kentucky Route Zero. I found it in the Lower Depths. Junebug and Johnny are on stage performing Too Late to Love You. The ceiling has pulled away to expose the stars above the two performers and I feel like I have always been here.

This bar is my home, this moment and song are home. I've been in this bar a million times. When I was a teen, and then as an adult, late nights after working in the hotel and then later with grad colleagues laughing about something crumegeonlike that Adorno probably said. It's dark but familiar. It's run down and the tables are little dirty, but it's comforting. And Johnny plays and Junebug sings and I am transported to every moment when a performance ripped my sensibilities into tiny pieces. It is nice, and reassuring. Like the wind at Hateno, or the sun in the Hearthian Solar System.

They are fleeting, ephemera, I can never get them back yet they will always be, as I will always be, and I will forever know them as home.

I’ve tried writing this over and over, and I keep failing to express how much I enjoy Kentucky Route Zero.

It’s a surreal, edge-of-consciousness ghost story about dying rural towns. Places tucked away, at the end of lonely roads, almost completely forgotten except by their dwindling inhabitants.

It’s a deeply personal, realist character study of working-class America, with dialogue that’s not only astoundingly well-written, but nuanced, and often endearing, despite its weighty themes.

It’s a travel story, where the final destination is shrouded in mystery and can only be accessed from a secret, reality-bending highway, buried deep beneath the caves of Kentucky. Hidden in plain sight.

It’s highly experimental. It’s not afraid to radically change graphic styles, gameplay mechanics, and control schemes. The soundtrack ranges from ethereal instrumental bluegrass, to buzzy drone ambient, to shoegaze, to synthpop, to anything and everything in between.

It took seven years to complete.

I want to keep writing about KRZ, but I also don’t, because it really should be experienced by you.

I have an admission: all of the other games I played this year are escapes. They’re enjoyable, and they’re fun to play, but when I turn them off, they disappear and I don’t think about them too much afterwards.

Kentucky Route Zero is different.

That’s not to say that it’s not enjoyable, or I had a bad time playing it. But I can see it pushing the entire medium of video games forward in a way most other games can’t even conceive of doing, let alone pull off successfully.

Do yourself a favor: after you finish reading this, go and pick it up. It's liquor for the soul and a dream that I wish I could never wake up from.

This was my third round of playing through the game. The earlier bouts however were back in the gap between the 4 and 5 episode release. This means I played it previously on steam 2 times but only up to episode 4.

The TV edition released last year is an excellent compilation of the full content experience structured in the indented order. I remember having to download the side-stories games zip-style from Cardboard Computer's website and then trying to figure out how they made sense to the story. I also think it just plays much more intuitively and comfortable with the joystick rather than the point and click cursor with the mouse. I'm not entirely sure since it was a long time ago but I also get the feeling they improved the flow of the game by making it easier and more intuitive placed interactions-icons in-game.

The game is currently ranked as one of the best and most influential games I've ever played. To be honest I can't really even tell you why that is. Gameplay-wise it's nothing especially fancy. It's an minimalist point and click.There are some dialog options to choose from but other than that there's no puzzles, no inventory and no challenge.

And I love it. The absolute minimalistic style of the gameloop feels incredibly fresh and not boring at all. The engagement comes from the environments, the characters, and the soundtrack blending perfectly together to create one of the best atmospheres that I've ever encountered inside of a video game. I get chills, and tears start rolling down my eyes without knowing why. I find myself really caring about the crow moe that I met just 5 min ago. I'm not entirely sure why.

This games truly hits the "are games art?" with a shining "Yes, certainly. At least in this case". Simply a must play for everyone, video game player or not.

This game is quintessentially working-class American in a way that I struggle to really put into words. Its folk-tale presentation underscores very real and very powerful themes and feelings about living life day-to-day in places that the rest of the world forgot or wants to forget.

Throughout the game, you see people of all stripes living their lives, trying to fulfill their goals and sometimes even succeeding! Other people are unable to escape their failures, living in forgotten side paths of the Zero that are only disturbed when the people that you follow come across them.

In the broadest strokes, this game's in the vein of Telltale's - an updated take on the adventure game genre, stripping it down to the barest pretense of gameplay and focusing on dialogue and aesthetics. Much like Telltale's games, your choices rarely matter - what matters is how the choices you make illustrate your interpretations of the characters.

In this aspect, KRZ outclasses Telltale games to a degree that's almost embarassing - the presentation has incredible aesthetics, the dialogue is consistently human and charming, and choices are done in an incredibly compelling way that the developers fearlessly continue to shift around as the game goes on. Sometimes you're an image of a wheel, bumbling around a map of Kentucky and exploring the backroads. Other times, you're picking both sides of a dialogue tree. Other times, you're punching numbers into a hotline that feels like it's from another world - I listened to twelve minutes of organ music because the man on the other end was asking me if I had heard anything similar myself.

It's hard to extricate discussion of the game itself from discussion of its now-infamous development. With Act I releasing in 2013, and Act V releasing just this January, it first came out when I was in middle school and finished when I was in college. My feelings about this are twofold - for one, now that it's finally out and complete, it's effectively a non-issue. You can play through every act in one sitting, if you please - they're about one to three hours long, it's more than doable. But on the other hand, why would you? The pacing is slow, meandering, and relaxed. The developers made a game that goes at its own pace and it reflected in the creation of the work itself. I gave each act a week between play sessions, and Act V a month, and I honestly think it's better off for it.

The final act, especially, hit hard in these trying times. The third act has a sequence that I don't want to risk spoiling in any way, and was truly magical. The Entertainment is one of my favorite works of media in general. The first act's rambling through the back roads felt just like my own explorations of Iowa's dirt roads with a buddy.The fourth act has lines peppered throughout and a final few scenes that will haunt me for days. The second act has an absolutely incredible and stark metaphor for the working class that will stick with me for weeks.

I think that this game isn't for everybody, but, and I mean this in the most non-patriotic way possible, if you're an American you owe it to yourself to at least give it a shot. It's powerful stuff, and you might not entirely expect what you'll get - for the better.

After I finished this game last night I sat back and was blown away. The really strange thing is that I'm not sure why I was blown away.

Trying to make a single delivery to 5 Dogwood Drive was a lot harder and more meandering than I ever thought it could be. And while that is the initial plot setup of this game, that's not it's main point to get across, it's just an end to justify the means.

Along the way we meet crazy and unique characters. A little boy. An Android. A ghost? I think... And every one of these characters is unique and precious in their own way. The way the dialogue comes out you almost feel like you get to create their personality a little bit as you go. You are choosing and creating what they say, and it's actual different stuff to choose from. Not just a bad option or a good option, but a personality shifting option. At one point you even create a song that is than sung out for your enjoyment.

There were a couple moments that impressed me intensely. One of them came in act III. We meet a new set of characters that take us for a ride to a bar and they literally blow the roof off the bar with a stunning performance of song and dance. A moment Ina video game that I soon won't forget. And that 1 of a couple different times.

When you think things are starting to make sense, they flip it and it doesn't make sense anymore.

This was a story about characters and people and struggles and continuing to fight on or to give up. This was a game that I really enjoyed but didn't quite know why. A game that had me looking things up to try to understand it better. It's a special game. It's not going to hit for everyone, but if you sit back and get lost in the text and the enchanting music that accompanies it, you might find yourself getting lost in this unique and crazy world too. I encourage you to give it a shot and embrace the craziness of Route Zero.

After I finished Act II of Kentucky Route Zero, I remember telling my boyfriend (who had played the game and loved it) that I found it beautiful but it made me want to drink. "It's so bleak, everything is dying around you and nothing is real and soon enough you've got to walk that lonesome valley." They asked me if I liked the game, said they couldn't tell. I said I couldn't tell either.

After I finished Act IV, my roommate who has not played the game asked me what it was about. I said "I guess it's about surviving under capitalism. It's about getting older and making peace with death and loss. It's about finding beauty and meaning in the things you do because you feel like you're supposed to. Obligation or habit or whatever. It's about..." I went on like this for a while and I'm pretty sure a lot of it didn't make sense. Eventually they just said "Oh. Wow. OK. So what's the story?" and I couldn't really tell them.

I've just finished the game now. Playing act V felt like the relief of watching the sun rise after a night you thought would never end. A little bit of hope after a long weary climb. That hour and a half pulled everything together magically. I felt like I had been playing a much more cohesive game this whole time.

Still, I don't think I could say what the story was or whether I liked Kentucky Route Zero overall. It sure was fourteen hours of pretty heavy vibes. At times I was enthralled, but at times it was almost too depressing and slow to continue. The characters were charming, the prose was gorgeous (if sometimes overwritten), and the occasional dry humor consistently caught me offguard in a really fun way, so I pressed on. After every act, I played something else for a couple days so I didn't burn out, and I think that's a better way to experience the game than trying to deathmarch through all of it at once. I learned my lesson from playing through Where The Water Tastes Like Wine in one sitting.

Anyway, Kentucky Route Zero can be exhausting, but there's really nothing else like it. Take that as a recommendation if it sounds like one to you. Regardless, I think I'm glad I played it.

EDIT: This review originally went up on May 22nd, 2025. Months later, I still think about KRZ a lot. Well, about parts of it. Other parts have faded like details of a dream. That feels intentional? My problems with it remain, I do still remember how some bits could be a slog, but the highlights stand out more and more in my memory. I still don't know if I liked this game, but I think I'm realizing that I love it. I've updated my star rating from 4 to 5 stars, for whatever that's worth.

When I first clicked through the steam page of Kentucky Route Zero, a couple of reviews left a mark on me. One player called it a masterpiece, another called it a depressing, fruitless slog. I formed a mental image; at best, this game was a piece of modern art, and at worst it was a pit of gratuitous misery. A habitual lover of both art and misery, I added it to my library.

It took me a couple of months to get to it, but February's accumulating pile of small horrors eventually broke the camel's back, and I opened the game for the first time. I talk often of how games greet you - how eager they are for you to play them, and how welcome you feel in their world. Kentucky Route Zero offered an experience I have yet to find in any other game. This game watches you, intently and indifferently. It doesn't plead for you to stay. It doesn't bar your exit. It listens to you when it wants to listen to you, and only then. I felt the gameplay weave its way into my environment; my in-game experiences were in conversation with the world around me. My sitting beside my cat, my playing after sunset, my playing on my own.

Loneliness, affection, dread and awe were the staples of my experience with the game - emotions which (the latter three especially) many games try to manufacture, to varying degrees of success. There was nothing artifical, however, about the feelings I felt playing KR0. My appreciation for the world mingled fondly with my amazement at the game design. My love for the characters stood hand-in-hand with my compassion for whatever real experiences may have fueled their creation. The game left space for me, the player, without forcing me haphazardly into a single perspective. Where other games might break the fourth wall, KR0 elects not to build one.

Kentucky Route Zero speaks a language easily understood by anybody who has reckoned with the reality-bending truth of isolation and obscurity. I can say with certainty that I belong on the Zero: I live alone, I have no family, I spend my days teaching english to faceless teenagers through a screen of scrawled annotations. It is easy to get lost in the brilliant art direction, soundtracking and dynamicism of this game and miss the game's overall message - but I heard it. I heard it between the radio stations, and in the skeletons' elecrticity hum. It says: there is always somewhere deeper, darker and lonelier to get lost in. You are not alone. Put up a fight.

This is a hard one for me to review. I really did liked it, but this was not the right time for me to play it, and I think I lost something because of that. I frequently got distracted while playing this, and I do not blame the game for it. This was an issue all the way to Act IV, at which point the game had finally grabbed me enough to keep me engaged despite of it all. I very recently played Disco Elysium, another text-heavy game, and I was still fatigued from that. I probably should have taken a break between the two, but alas. I feel like it was a missed opportunity for me because it is so easy to see how magical this game would be if I was simply in the right state of mind; there is likely a good metaphor in that somewhere. I really hope I will come back to it at some point and do a second play through both to see the story from a different perspective but also to rectify my crime. On to the review.

The narrative of this game is very well put together, especially the narration itself. In telling the story the role of the narrator is passed around between main character and side characters, but not only does the storytellers change, both the medium used and the tense also does. One of my favourite examples of this is a scene that is entirely played out as two people watching a video recording from their archives of the characters doing what they were doing at the time and talking over it, both about their present lives as well as commenting on what is happening on the tape. The scene both showed what it needed to show but also managed to tell more than it otherwise could have. I also found the story interesting and it had all the satisfaction you expect to get from a fractured story that you slowly piece together as you go along. However, to me this game is more about the feelings you have playing it than the story itself. The world around them is the main protagonist and the characters simply inhabit it. This is where I'd draw the comparison with Sátantángó, playing this game (once I got into it) felt a lot like watching that film.

The game is primarily a point-and-click adventure with the exception of all but one of the interludes. The interludes are shorter (but not always that short) interactive experiences. They break up the gameplay nicely and are all good. My (and I'd wager most people's) favourite is a "VR" play, which I believe can be played in VR, while the telephone one was the low point for me. Back to the main game. I very much appreciate how the game respects the player's time. Quite often I would brace myself for doing some backtracking but the game instead faded to black and simply continued when it assumed you were done. I can see how that could result in completionists being frustrated for missing out, but to me it always came as a relief. On that note I think the game could be better about either showing you what can be interacted with or telling you when there is nothing left. I am trained to interact with everything in the fear of missing something interesting when playing these types of games, and in a game as slow-paced as this I was sometimes bored walking around looking for interaction when there were none left.

When it comes to the aesthetics I really liked the look of this game; it simply looks great and I really like what they achieve with this simplistic art style. As for the audio I am a bit torn. The music that is there is fantastic. I actually listened to the OST for this game years before I ever played it. The problem to me is that there isn't too much of it (more parallels to Sátantángó). I do see that it adds to the atmosphere, that most of the sound in the game is ambient, but at least when playing the acts back-to-back over the span of a weekend (and not 7 years like some did), it feels empty after a while. I believe they could have achieved a similar atmosphere in a more interesting way.

All in all I am happy I played it, but I am also a bit sad that I weren't as in the mood for these types of games as I thought I would when I started. I hope I get a second chance sometime in the future.

Finally a very non-controversial opinion: my favourite scene is Junebug's performance. That scene was enchanting.

Every once in awhile I enjoy playing an indie game, helps keep up my gamer cred. No, but really if I game looks neat I'll try it. I learned about Kentucky Route Zero by accident.

So, let's get into it. The first things you'll notice, and which I really enjoyed, are the lighting and music. The game is staged very well with a nice moonlit light casting across the scene and does give the game a spooky, mystical feeling. These moments are increased with the great bluegrass soundtrack. Speaking of bluegrass, this game is set in Kentucky and I love everything about the Bluegrass State.

When media tries to represent us country folk I always judge them strictly. Luckily, Cardboard Computers did good by me. Their magical Kentucky isn't filled with drunk, dumb, angry hillbillies, they show a respect for the land. Plenty of good music, some of the locals feel like real people, they incorporate horses, bourbon distilleries, and it's just very backwoodsy. Course the Kentucky-ness isn't the main focus.

The narrative and world of this game strikes me as very Nightvale-like. Lots of surreal, weird things that you are just meant to assume as normal. Some of the important strangeness does get a backstory, but some stuff is just strange. Now this is an indie and the story falls into bouts of pretentiousness. One moment you're reminiscing with an old man about the old days, next you're having a deep conversation about the meaning of life.

I do feel the game is strongest in the first two episodes. The journey between Conway, the world weary delivery man, & Shannon, repair woman with a mystic interest, works well as a buddy, road trip story. An old man looking to make one last delivery. The narrative is set up and moves at a good pace with the right level of oddity for me.

The last two episodes start to really drag on for me. You pick up a whole cadre of followers that sorta muddle the plot. I especially found the musicians superfluous. The plot loses focus; delving into the troubles of aging, machines replacing men, passage of time. The dialogue turns into novel's worth of text & that pretentiousness rears its head. No one seems capable of short, straight answers either. "Hey, what's his name?" "Some used to say he.... he was the best.... then when the factory.... now the old building sits... course that's life.... but now, he's named Clark."

There are some neat plot twists and there is still one episode yet to be released that will hopefully tie up the lose ends. Conway's story and mission to deliver his package are the strong points of the game. And to say this is a game may be a stretch. At the very start, the game does seem it'll have puzzle elements, but nope. It's more of a interactive novel/walking simulator.

All in all, the game does have a very backwoods, mystical feel with great music & look, and there are interesting story elements, but it falls into the indie game trappings a little too much.

I don’t put much stock in Metacritic these days, especially when it comes to user scores. I used to trust them way more than the so-called critics ratings, but over the past decade or so we’ve witnessed the consolidation of the extreme mindset. These days it seems every game is either a 0 or a 10 without any room for discussion or nuance, which is not only quite frustrating when you’re looking for genuine opinions, it also makes user ratings borderline useless. After spending 10 hours going through all 5 episodes of Kentucky Route Zero, however, I can honestly say the user scores for this game resonated with me a lot more than its critical opinions.

I honestly don't get the indie darling status this game gets. I finished it and I was left puzzled by my impression, since I’m normally not this far off from general consensus on most games. I came away with the feeling that I had just played through a thinly-veiled attempt to criticise capitalism masked as a pretentiously surreal allegory, so I checked some reviews of some people I normally find insightful to see why they thought KRZ was special. ‘I definitely missed something, some hidden meaning or plot thread’, I actually told myself. But what I found on the other end was a number of quintessential high brow reviews, every single one of them unabashedly singing the game's praises in an abstract, loosely-tied poetry framework that ironically ends up upstaging KRZ in its perceived pretentiousness. The poetry-like ambiance was actually something I noticed throughout my playthrough. With its prose tendencies and myriad of dialogue options, it often felt like this game was trying hard to be a player-driven poem. But this too felt contrived and pointless. If I wanted to write my own poem I wouldn't play a game. I’d write my own poem.

There are certain things KRZ does notoriously well throughout - namely soundscape and a stylised, often haunting art -, but to me it fell short on virtually everything else. While it does give off an immediately charming and moody vibe as you start, it quickly loses its grip on the player, becoming too weird and unintentionally unreliable to be able to capture their interest in any sort of consistent way. I genuinely - and this never happens with me and games - dozed off several times during the unbelievably lengthy text exposition segments, struggling to stay awake more frequently than I'd care to admit. I usually have no problem with text-based interfaces, but the text in question needs to captivate. Not even going into the fact that some segments dragged on to an absurd degree, walls of text that are unable to arouse even the slightest bit of interest - though there were a few exceptions throughout - become a problem. KRZ does this a lot, unfortunately. Everything went to shit after the intriguing first act, with the subsequent ones falling short of its initial promise.

After the 4th act I literally wrote “there's NO way the last act can make up for the dreariness of what came before it!” And it didn't, even though the ending turns out to be more enjoyable than most of the rest. I’ll give kudos to KRZ for an impeccable sound design, with great audio effects and musical moments (the bar scene is phenomenal), and for the fact that they did seem to have tried - albeit failed - to bring something new into the gaming landscape. Everything else, however, didn’t bring me any discernible enjoyment. Its poetic undertones didn’t land. Its capitalism critique didn’t land. Its blend of abstract surrealism and down-to-earth, mundane dialogue structure didn't land. I’m honestly happy for the ones who got something meaningful out of it, but to me, Kentucky Route Zero was nothing more than a disappointment. 4.5/10