There's always something deeply unnerving about a gas
station at night. Depending on the road, it can be the only point of
light for miles and miles, and beyond is nothing but an infinite abyss
of curves and strange noises in between you and your destination. That
Kentucky Route Zero's very first image is a gas station at twilight is
apt. The game knocks you off-kilter in the first seconds, placing you in
the last fading glow of sunlight before nightfall on a threadbare
stretch of road. Even when the game's at its most peaceful and gentle,
it never quite feels stable or permanent, like everything good, bad,
strange, or affecting that happens in the next five acts could disappear
into the darkness at any moment.
That sense of
impermanence is such a crucial part of Kentucky Route Zero, more so now
that it's a complete work with a full arc and definitive ending. Beyond
the various oddities and nonsensical moments, at its heart it's a game
about American progress and the corpses it leaves in its wake, a pensive
Wizard of Oz-like point-and-click adventure through a country whose
yellow brick road is built on futile hopes and unanswered prayers. Its
version of Kentucky is a nothing-place of American dreams breathing
their last, if they're not already dead. Its protagonist, a grizzled,
tired delivery truck driver named Conway, is headed in the same
direction.
Conway ends up here making his final delivery for his
friend Lysette's antique store, after which he intends to retire.
However, the road to the delivery address on 5 Dogwood Drive takes him
through the Zero, an abstract Kentucky highway where, it seems, all
things obsolete--people, places, objects--come to make residence. The
Zero is, essentially, America's purgatory, a place that looks like
cubist paintings of Silent Hill, and sounds like detuned radios and the
white noise of old TVs. Hiding behind all of it are old creaky workers
lamenting that they never earned enough to move away and coal miners
crushed to death after giving their blood and sweat to a corporation
they will never stop owing money to. Their stories are underscored by
soul-shaking music that only the wrinkled and withered remember or
perform. Every major beat of Conway's journey is punctuated by American
requiems, ranging from mournful bluegrass elegies about people time
forgot, sung by shadowy riverfolk, to ethereal love songs so powerful
the skies literally open up over the stage to accept them.
You
navigate the Zero--in all of its fever-dream weirdness--primarily
through dialogue trees and old-school adventure game mechanics. It's
fairly linear when it comes to the particulars of making progress;
either a tiny box will come up at your destination telling you to click
on it to proceed, or you can simply run through every option until you
proceed anyway. But staying on task is harder than it seems. Every area
has one interaction that will advance the story, but there are a dozen
other objects to examine, a dozen other NPC stories to hear, or a dozen
other switches and buttons and context-sensitive areas to walk that
shift the perspective of the entire area. All that added potential
context really takes effort to ignore.
In the first area
of the game, Conway has a talk with a friendly gas station attendant
about the road, about old age, about poetry, even. Then the power goes
out, and Conway has to make his way into the gas station's
mineshaft-turned-basement after the lights suddenly shut off. There,
while flipping the circuit breakers, you come across and invisibly
assist in grabbing some fallen dice for what appears to be a D&D
game in progress in another dimension. Why, exactly, is there a D&D
game happening in another dimension? You never quite know--there are,
admittedly, some long threads to pull on in this game that lead nowhere,
and although that's deliberate, it is occasionally frustrating--but
that deceptively simple task is what passes for a tutorial in Kentucky
Route Zero. It shows you exactly how it's going to try and sway you from
the end goal time and time again.
The vast menagerie of
characters Conway meets on this journey contain multitudes; their
dwellings and belongings are full of histories and unresolved
relationships. These things beg for your attention and curiosity, urgent
gold boxes waiting to be clicked on your way to the next critical step
in the story. Often, they create more questions about these people and
their world than they answer, but it becomes clear over time that there
are answers, in every area, begging for you to chase them down. The
entire game is a minefield of curiosity, where the only way to plow
through to the end of each Act is to either thoroughly exhaust your
curiosity or have absolutely none of it. The former is much more
rewarding, and the game excels at making you want it, always placing the
next narrative breadcrumb or the next leading question or the next
inquisitive line of dialogue within easy reach, even if the payoff is
miles down the road. However, it also means it's very easy to lose the
main plot in the process.
That's especially true since
much of the poignancy and power of the main plot often requires you to
proactively listen to and learn from the world. The stories being told
along the way can take many forms--from homespun wisdom to analytical
science theses to ordinary phone conversations between loved ones--but
the game bets the farm on you being comprehensively thorough about
engaging with all of it. With no way to rewind and play specific scenes
over again without replaying the entire Act, missing a specific bit of
information can leave entire portions of the game as obtuse, and not in
the intentional way some scenes are.
To
play Kentucky Route Zero means having to be present and honed in on the
world in a way that doesn't happen often in games. That frequently
means hearing information relayed in a vast rainbow of ways, the game
subtly training you to hear other people whose voices and experiences we
are often trained by the modern world to tune out. The sharpness of the
dialogue is so crucial and executed so well in that regard. Information
is conveyed through every interaction, but even with the minor NPCs,
the game emphasizes their worth as a character first and a mechanical
function of the game second. Whether their next line opens the way to
the next scene or not, there's a sense in every line of dialogue in the
game that lives have been lived, this character has a history here we
will never know, and their weariness is on display and palpable. It
makes the world of this game feel real and tangible and lived in, which
accentuates the disquieting fact that there are people who actually live
in such desolation.
Lines of dialogue from side
characters can inform another character's major decisions to take the
journey of their lifetime later. A stray line during a radio broadcast
can tell you why Conway wound up at a particular location or why a road
is blocked, or why the history of a place matters. But as engaging as it
all is, especially in the later Acts of the game where you start having
more control over which character to follow into the next scene, new
information and character development can happen in a scene that you
might've missed entirely. Still, the solution is to play that Act again,
and there's so much to see and hear in the game that it's possible to
have a very different and equally worthwhile experience next time.
Sometimes
the new information comes from choosing the dialogue in a straight
one-on-one conversation; sometimes, you get a totally different
perspective out of nowhere, like a segment where you select dialogue
between museum researchers as they talk about your present actions in
the past tense while watching you on a security camera playback. It
forces you to think about how others view Conway and the companions who
come to ride with him along the way with some level of psychological
distance, a storytelling risk that pays off the more we start to learn
about why these characters are who they are.
That
risk starts to pay off starting in Act III, where you can control the
other side of a conversation, selecting responses for both Conway and
the other participant. After seeing a doctor about an injury, and seeing
the nightmarish remedy for that injury once he's awake, you can choose
to let Conway be out of sorts from the anesthesia or perfectly lucid.
Through the next line of dialogue, you can let him and the doctor talk
about continued treatment, let Conway stew in bitterness or very
justifiable fear, or hop right into the worrisome particulars of the
bill. It's a captivating game of conversational tennis against yourself.
You wind up experiencing and creating the story all at once, which
makes the game more mechanically dream-like than anything. Combined with
just how abstract many of the concepts and emotions you bounce back and
forth can be, it's not just a difference of agency so much as using
that agency to form a group perspective, a collective conscience these
characters will never know, but you do.
Very little in
the overarching story of the Zero happens necessarily by your choice,
and that's a hard fact of real life that has been translated admirably
here. No matter how much you tell your companions that your injury is
fine or dodge questions about how deep in debt you are to those who help
you, as Conway himself says, every man eventually has to settle up. And
in that respect, the larger beats of this story will occur regardless
of the choices you make. The intricate control you have over many of the
game's conversations isn't about changing your fate, but how you parse
it and accept it. That dovetails beautifully into the larger themes of
the game, of getting to the acceptance stage of all the grief each
character has endured. In that acceptance, you do have complete control.
People in this game will get ill, you will miss your chance to tell
someone you loved them, you won't quite know what their last wishes
were, and the world outside the Zero will often intrude and make life
just a little harder for its residents once again. You can be angry, or
petulant, or morose, and you can let that be the story of this world,
but that's a choice you can make in every scene. To sit with each
interactable character is to sit with and have empathy for their
failures.
That empathy is important given how alienating
and lonely Kentucky Route Zero can feel. Much of the game's
interpretation of Kentucky life is portrayed in a very spartan, angular
style of giant polygons meticulously fit together like puzzle pieces
until they resemble minimalist facsimiles of human beings, trees,
houses, and the like. It's often stark and eerie, which makes the
moments where it's striking and stunning all the more effective. An
early transition from the outside of a house to its interior occurs by
watching the vector lines that form the building's exterior move aside
like shrinking geometric vines. One of the most powerful examples is a
simple scene of Conway and Lysette sitting at a breakfast table. The
geometric white streaks at Conway's temples and his slouching back hint
at his exhaustion, informing his decision to make this next delivery his
last; Lysette's face blank, but held wistfully, and framed by square
glasses pointed blankly towards the outside world even. It's an abstract
picture that still speaks volumes.
It should be said that Act V ends not with a bang, not with a whimper, but with the kind of deep sigh you hear from working folks at five o'clock on a Friday after a hard week.
The game's
aesthetic is capable of portraying breathtaking Midwestern landscapes,
stark monuments to the coldness of industry, unfeeling research rooms,
and cathedrals to forgotten American ephemera, bolstered ever so
slightly by some new and subtle graphical grace notes added to the game
since Act IV's release. New lighting effects have been added, with
specific scenes being brightened, and, most notably, a dazzling
starfield effect during the game's stand-out musical number, “Too Late
To Love You.” Those scattered moments of warmth and wonder have been
sweetened all the more by the changes, making the scenes of respite even
more welcome and memorable. Still, it all pales in comparison to what
awaits you in the long-anticipated Act V: a heavenly place of sun and
grass, demolished by the raging storms and flooding. The visually
exhilarating elements of the final landscape make the horror of all the
death and destruction hit even heavier.
Despite that
initial visual gutstab of Act V, it should be said that it ends not with
a bang, not with a whimper, but with the kind of deep sigh you hear
from working folks at five o'clock on a Friday after a hard week. I
assumed, going into that final Act, that we'd be looking at a story of
rebellion, a day of reckoning for the marginalized and downtrodden. I
should've known better. Kentucky Route Zero isn't screaming for
vengeance against all that America has lost, though there is an
undeniable righteous anti-capitalist streak running throughout.
The
game doesn't so much resolve all the seething tensions and unfulfilled
promises seen prior, but demands that you shoulder some of the weight of
remembering and honoring what you've seen and heard. The overall point
of the game is that not everyone's life will be paid off in a way that
provides catharsis, or comfort, or satisfaction. Sometimes it just ends,
sometimes it keeps going whether we're there to see it or not, and
sometimes it's just disappointment. Conway has debts to pay, and there
is a chance he drops dead working to pay them back. That is as American
as it gets in the 21st century. What Act V does, though, is give
everyone one last chance to rail against that fact, mourn it, continue
to have hopes regardless which, too, is what it is to live here.
Kentucky Route Zero has been priming us for seven years to recognize
that life isn't fair, though we'd gain so much if it was, and sometimes
we're lucky enough to make it as fair as it can be. But just as often,
we're not. Kentucky Route Zero is ultimately a story about America's
ghosts, literal and metaphorical. It's a story about entire ways of life
coming to one singular place to die quietly, hopefully with dignity. In
all of its oddity, it never backs down from the fact that all that is
now dead will stay dead, and for those who have settled in along the
Zero, that includes the American dream.
