Kentucky Route Zero

Review

In Kentucky Route Zero we initially take helm of Conway a delivery lorry driver working for an antique shop. The shop will close down for good, and Conway is tasked with making a final delivery to a certain 5 Dogwood Drive. He gets lost, and stops by a gas station, where he meets a man who tells him the only way to get to Dogwood Drive is via a hidden motorway in Kentucky called the “Zero”.

A few moments later, Conway has a strange encounter with Weaver Marquez, who tells him to meet her cousin, Shannon Marquez, at a mine shaft. The pair become travel companions, and eventually manage to find Route Zero just under the Mammoth National Park.

For the remaining of the game, Conway and Shannon venture into Route Zero in search for Dogwood Drive, while experiencing all sorts of surreal events and meeting cryptic characters, such as a little boy with a giant Eagle as a brother, two android musicians and creepy glowing skeleton workers.

The game ends just as it began: so weird!

Kentucky Route Zero is divided into 5 acts (plus interludes), released independently between 2013 and 2020.

One of the particularities of this game that was immediately obvious to me was how consistently layered the dialogues were. A bit verbose, to be sure, but intricately written. On the other hand, some conversations were also extremely tedious. For instance, there is a scene in Act IV in which a fisherman is talking with his catch (a squid I believe) for like 5 minutes. In the Limits & Demonstration interlude you are required to read a bunch of descriptions at a museum, which takes about 10-15 minutes of gameplay. In yet another scene, two people are discussing the fruit guava for several minutes. There are many more such dialogues, which were quickly forgotten, as they seemed completely tangential to the story.

Kentucky Zero Route is also super bizarre! And even though this bizarreness is explicit and ubiquitous, characters behave as though nothing weird is happening. For instance, due to an injury at the mine shaft, Conway requires medical assistance, so a giant eagle takes Conway and Shannon to a forest, where they are supposed to meet a physician. Nobody seems to find that strange. An electronic mammoth on a boat? Who hasn’t seen one. Glowing skeletons working in a brewery? Mundane stuff. What about an office full of actual brown bears in a government building? Even though not required to progress in the game, I did have Conway and Shannon get in the room, just to check how they reacted. Neither even flinched…

When I started playing the game I thought maybe the surrealness will somehow dissipate. Surely, the game cannot maintain this level of bizarreness so consistently. How naive! I dare say it got even weirder the more I played. After Act II, I essentially resigned, just laid back and let myself feel I was tripping…

But, holy crap, what a trip!!! The game is surreal, sure, but a damn good surrealism, I’ll tell you that! Every scene, no exception, is imbued with weird elements. Not even a simple conversation at a bar is exempt from a certain strangeness. Do you remember the interlude “The Entertainment”? Here you have a typical around-the-corner bar, with people conversing and submerging their sorrows in whisky. Just when you think you finally got a pretty standard scene, there comes a glowing skeleton taking notes at the end.

And I’ll be honest – I got like ¼ of the game’s premise. At some point, I simply gave up on trying to understand every cryptic event in the game and just let myself immerse in these surrealistic vibes.

Despite the absence of facial features like eyes, mouth, etc, I found the graphics and visuals superb. The choice of washed-out colours was brilliant, as it added mystery and a certain intimacy to each setting. The movements of the characters are fluid, and exploration is always restricted to a manageable setting (i.e., there is no risk of wandering off, not knowing where to go).

The music was excellent. That concert at the Lower Depths bar where Johnny and Junebug perform is, to me, the best scene in the entire game, and, possibly, one of the best scenes in video games ever (I’d even go as far as to say that the game was worth playing just for that scene!).

With very few exceptions, there is no real voicing, only text dialogues, and I felt this was a bit of a downer. Dialogues are similar across characters – they all share the same odd mannerisms when talking. Voicing would have added a bit more diversity and colour to the characters, making them more distinguishable and memorable.

OK. Now, the bad stuff.

Well, I just have one critique point really, but, unfortunately, it is a major one for me: where is the gameplay?

Honestly, if I set out my mind to play a video game, I want to play the video game!
As I mentioned in my review of “To the Moon”, taking out the experience of playing the game completely defeats the purpose of the medium. Undoubtedly, some of you will disagree with me and call me philistine for not getting that Kentucky Route Zero is an art form, self-expression in gaming. But that is exactly the problem I have with this game. If it’s art, then I’d catalogue it as such, not label it a “video game”.

Of course, you might counter-argue and say, “who are you to define what video games should be about, are you living in the eighties?”. Fair enough!

But I kind of make the parallel to watching a movie where you are only able to listen to the dialogues (i.e., the screen is black for the entire duration of the movie). Let’s even assume that the script is amazing, with incredible voice acting and story line. But wouldn’t you still feel that something was missing from the movie experience? How would that be different from listening to an audio-book? (By the way, such a film does exist: “Branca de Neve” by João César Monteiro). Just as showing a black screen would remove an important aspect of movie watching, or omitting letters from a book would remove an important aspect of book reading, so I feel that a lack of gameplay is removing a critical aspect of the gaming experience.

In all my inexperience playing games such as these, I wonder why the developers went against adding a few puzzles here and there to keep gamers engaged. Fans of Kentucky Route Zero might claim that it would have taken the focus of the game, but I simply can’t agree. Wouldn’t it be awesome to actually make Xanadu a real gaming experience? Or perhaps adding some point-and-click elements? Surely, this extra interaction wouldn’t have distracted players from the story – if anything, it would have made it more intimate and immersive, in my opinion.

You see, after realizing you cannot fail, that the decisions you make are inconsequential, that there is no wrong answer, and that the ending will be the same regardless of what dialogues you choose, I simply stopped over-analysing the different dialogue choices, and went on with whatever felt more intuitive to me. Unfortunately, this resulted in me becoming emotionally detached from the story, which is probably not what the developers had intended in the first place.

So, if you decide to go ahead and play this game, go in with the same mindset as when you are about to view an abstract painting or watch an abstract movie; set aside your preconceptions on playing video games, lower your expectations with regards to entertainment, and preclude from analysing every scene – otherwise, you might get frustrated.

If you follow these advice, you might just be able to appreciate Kentucky Route Zero.