Kentucky Route Zero: TV Edition

Genre: Graphic Adventure

Players: 1

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Review:

Kentucky Route Zero is a Graphic Adventure that at least begins with players in the role of Conway, a truck driver accompanied by an old hound and trying to make a delivery to an address he can’t find, and is soon told that to get there he’ll need to take the elusive and mysterious Zero of the game’s title, though of course doing so isn’t as simple as it is at first made out to be.

Kentucky Route Zero has been critically acclaimed since the first of its five episodic parts originally released on PC in 2013, with the final episode releasing early in 2020, followed by a console port containing the entire story coming to multiple platforms including the Switch shortly afterwards. The game has been greatly lauded for its surreal and magical tale of a mythical backwater America abandoned by time.

It seems like just about everyone loves this game, but for me… I just don’t get it. What starts as a mystery gradually seems to unfold into a tale that’s random and wandering, and I find myself wondering just what the point of it all is. It definitely has the feel of something aiming to be Art with a capital “A”, but I’m not sure just what it’s trying to say. The game has good writing and strong characters, but its story feels aimless, and eventually so too do the characters.

The way I see it, either I’m the big dumb idiot that’s too dense to appreciate this absolute masterpiece… or I’m the child pointing at the emperor and declaring that he has no clothes. I’ll leave it to the reader to decide which.

In any case, while the player starts out as Conway, the player will change roles to multiple characters throughout the story, and the game isn’t always clear about things when this happens. Sometimes you’ll swap to a new character and it’ll be a complete mystery what sort of connection they have to the rest of the story. The gameplay isn’t too difficult – you’re mainly selecting options in conversation trees, and choosing to look at a limited number of points of interest in the environment around you, but there aren’t really any puzzles to solve. This game wasn’t intended to be a challenge, it was intended to be an experience.

As far as the presentation goes, this game uses what appears to be a flat-shaded 3D style of graphics to give the impression of a 2D look, resulting in an abstract aesthetic that works really well for the sort of surreal sort of story being told here. Likewise, the sound here is very good, with ambient noises helping to sell the atmosphere of the lonely places you’ll be wandering through. And while this is mostly a quiet experience, there are occasional moments where the silence is broken up by music, and on those occasions the soundtrack here is really superb, with some really excellent and mournful songs to really drive home that same lonely and sorrowful theme that runs through much of the game.

There are definitely elements of beauty in Kentucky Route Zero, but that beauty is couched in an experience that feels largely cryptic and inscrutable. I am totally onboard for an “artsy-fartsy” game (Gris, for example, is completely abstract in its art, and I absolutely loved it), but I have to feel like there’s something there for me to latch on to, and in Kentucky Route Zero it just felt like a jumble of stuff tossed together. I’m sure others are out there who will find this to be a stimulating experience, but I just thought it was exhausting.

tl;dr – Kentucky Route Zero is a Graphic Adventure that starts by following a delivery truck driver searching for the mysterious titular road, but soon becomes a collection of disparate elements that honestly just felt random and aimless to me. The presentation here is excellent, but I didn’t feel like there was an experience here I could immerse myself in – it just felt inscrutable to me. Maybe I just don’t “get it”, but I can only review based on my own experience, and my experience was disappointment tinged with only brief moments of enjoyment.

Grade: C+

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