Kentucky Route Zero: TV Edition (PS4, 2020)
This might be difficult to believe, but I don't write up every game I play. I go into a game largely intending to, but sometimes I just don't have anything or enough to say. Sometimes I don't think it's worth talking about or recommending something. Sometimes I'm just lazy.
Very rarely we have a game like Kentucky Route Zero where for the entire time I spend playing it I think and I wonder and I struggle with what I can say before eventually deciding that if a game is going to drown me in quite as many words as this does, I'm going to return the favour.
In the Annapurna Interactive Deluxe Collector's Edition, Kentucky Route Zero is introduced by its creators:
I didn't really know anything about this game before I played it. I didn't know that it was released episodically, with five 'Acts' released over a period of seven years. This immediately sets alarm bells ringing. It's easy enough for someone to play the complete version now (or with the subtitle "TV Edition" as it's called on console) but I can't imagine being really invested in something that takes seven years to reach a conclusion. It seems like there was additional content to go along with these releases - websites, phone numbers and the like, but it's still going to be, at best, a hard sell.
I'm waffling a bit here because eventually I'm going to have to start talking about the game. In the past when I've been critical of a game I post a glib summary of the plot to show how silly it is. I can't do that with Kentucky Route Zero because there's so much of it. Go and look at the Wikipedia page. If you plan on playing it and don't want spoilers, read a sentence or two here or there. Random sentences will make as much sense as the whole. The game starts with you in control of a delivery driver named Conway who's struggling to find an address. He stops at a petrol station and is told he needs to take the Zero, an apparently mysterious road which you can't just get to by driving there. He sets off in search of this road and his final destination of 5 Dogwood Drive, meeting a host of other characters and visiting even more surreal locations along the way.
It's also hard to really describe the plot because of... well, a few reasons. The first act is Conway driving around. He meets and teams up with a girl named Shannon Marquez in an abandoned mine. In Act Two they end up at the Bureau of Reclaimed Spaces, a Kafka-esque administration hub where they hope they can find directions to Conway's destination. After this they go looking for a doctor to look at the leg Conway injured in the mine. They meet a boy named Ezra who lives in the forest with his brother, a giant bird named Julien. They fly along the river and find the doctor who treats him and gives him a new, glowing skeletal leg. Then in Act Three their truck crashes and they team up with an android synth-pop duo on a motorbike.
The point is, the plot changes around each act. It changes in a way where you can physically track your reaction and expectations changing. In Act One you want to learn about Conway and where he's going and why. In Act Two you go somewhere to get answers and you're hopeful of things going somewhere. Act Three starts with a half hour long, unskippable student-produced play you need to watch before you team up with the androids and hold on a minute. I need to sit for half an hour, watching some people in a bar talking about... trouble with the distillery? About that night's entertainment not showing up? About someone not getting a promotion at work? It was at this point the game started trying my patience. When Act Four came along and was set on a boat with a bunch of new people who weren't introduced I gave up and started resenting it. By the time Act Five came along and I was in control of a cat and some people were crying about dead horses I'd never seen I just stopped paying attention.
In terms of genre, Kentucky Route Zero seems described mostly as point and click adventure. This isn't a genre of game I have a lot of experience with, but I don't know how well this format works for the story which is told here. There's a lot of dialogue to read, there are things to interact with and choices to make when you do, but almost none of this seems to have any effect on anything. The events that take place don't change. Nothing different happens to any characters or relationships. I don't think you learn anything new. In Act Four there are options to go to one location or another. I played the game twice and chose the different ones each time, and there's very little insight to anything either way.
The point and click format also struggles under the sheer weight of words the game has packed into it. If you read everything and if you think about your responses a first time playthrough of this game will take at least six hours. Even a second run will take about the same if you read everything again in the hope that foreknowledge might help you understand what's going on. When you factor in the attention drift that happens about halfway through the game the amount of reading really starts to drag the game down.
I don't have a problem with video games being experimental with regards to genre and format. I don't mind walking simulators as a concept even though they're basically just films where you need to move around and press X every now and then. If the content of them is engaging, then that's fine. Kentucky Route Zero falls under the weight of its own surrealism and the sheer amount of its characters. It takes too long to attempt to reveal anything, and by the time anything happens you're so fatigued from how long it's taken to reach that point you've stopped caring anyway. As the game goes on more characters are introduced... well, more characters show up without warning and it becomes harder to keep track of everyone.
This game is very well regarded. Its Metacritic ratings for the various acts and versions are all in the high 80s and low 90s. When you look up the game online you find various subreddits extolling its virtues. It's great. It's a step forward for the Games As Art argument. It's spellbinding, it's tragic, it's well-written and one of the best games ever. Nothing has ever touched me emotionally like this. Actual reviews say similar. You read a bit further looking for an actual explanation why and nothing comes. I still don't know why this game is so well-regarded.
Come to think of it, I don't know what this game's about. I mean About. I tried watching some (hour long-plus) videos about it on youtube before I realised, I shouldn't have to do this. I've gone through the game twice, I've read everything and it's not had any effect on me. Someone telling me it's about how evil capitalism is isn't going to be a moment of revelation, and if it did then that's not a good thing anyway. The game is so impenetrable that when actual moments which might or should be poignant and significant happen, they aren't. Something happens to Conway in the end of Act Four, but it's completely outwith your control (which is part of the point) and you know so little about his fate that it just has no impact. I think the game and its writing aspires to literature more than any other medium, but the way it's presented prevents any sense of significance or symbolism from imparting itself on the player.
I think this is partly the point. One comment I did see pop up is that the game is partly about how people aren't really in control of their lives, or the things they do. That forces more powerful and outside our control, ultimately, have more influence on what happens to us than anything we do. That there will be forces which are effectively unanswerable to their actions, and that the game focuses on people who do have to deal with them. But it's all too vague. It's not that things aren't spelled out explicitly, it's that they come and go in a dreamlike state where nothing makes sense and it's a constant uphill battle to feel any sense of grounding or empathy or relation to anything or anyone.
With this in mind, there are aspects of the game which should contribute to effectively putting its message across. The art style is nice, if lacking a bit in colour. The ambient soundtrack and world design is very distinctive and striking. The designs of the game's actual locations are imposing too, from Equus Oils right at the start with a giant horse's head in the building to the impossibly shaped Bureau to others, the locations are unique and fantastic examples of the clear imagination and creativity that went into the game. One subject of praise I have seen about the game is that it recreates a sense of place well. People who're from Kentucky and the surrounding area recognise it and identify with it. I can't speak to this specifically, but I have certainly played other games with a more dramatic and immersive sense of place.
But then even considering this, there are moments which should be emotionally resonant but which just aren't because of how difficult it is to follow the narrative. Remember in Red Dead Redemption when Jose Gonzalez plays as you go into Mexico for the first time? Or later when music plays as you go back to your family for the first time? How the music gradually comes in and plays over the usual sounds and ambient music, complementing and dominating at the same time while also defining the moment, physically and emotionally? Kentucky Route Zero has similar a few moments.
There are moments, usually at the end of the acts, which tie into the sense of place I mentioned earlier. Where a country/folky/bluesy acoustic guitar number will play, usually with a few shadowy figures in profile in the foreground of the picture, suggesting they're part of the audience along with you. The songs themselves are good, but unlike Red Dead where they make you realise how momentous what's happening actually is you just sort of wonder what and why. Why is music playing? Why is the music significantly more arresting than the events surrounding it? Arguably the most memorable part of the game is when the android musicians you team up with play their song in a bar. The roof tiles float away and the stars streak across the sky like a time-lapse photograph showing the movements of everything in the sky. The song - musically and lyrically - is absolutely haunting, and feels like a landmark moment in what's going on. You wonder who they're singing about (it's called Too Late to Love You and you can choose the lyrics).
But this is near the start of this act. You subsequently spend an hour in a cave with a computer that doesn't make any sense and the poignancy and impact of the music is long gone. I tried to like Kentucky Route Zero. I went in with goodwill (largely through ignorance, I knew virtually nothing about it) and for about the first two acts I played in curiosity and expectation. Eventually though the game just falls under the weight of the amount of strange, unresolved content which even undermines the actual memorable moments.
In a way it's hard to determine whether or not Kentucky Route Zero is a bad game. It's not broken. It's not lazy. Everything works. It's clear a lot of care and attention and detail and imagination went into the writing and the art design. Some aspects of this are more successful than others. Ultimately though a game like this only succeeds if it leaves an impact on the player, and it just didn't for me. I can still barely describe what this is about. As distinctive as the art style is, it's not going to stick with me. As much as some people on the internet think it's a transcendent masterpiece, I don't know if they could ever convince me. There might be a Message here, but I don't think it's communicated well and I don't know how well it even could be communicated in this format. The introduction to this game I posted earlier says "it's also a story, so it has an ending" and I just don't think that's accurate.
I don't know if I'm trying to not criticise this game or not, but it's just hard to decide what I think. It's hard to follow, the plot, narrative and characterisation is lacking and there are several prolonged occasions where it feels like an endurance test with the makers off to the side of the screen sRacial Sluring at you as you actually sit there taking this in. It didn't have the effect on me it seems to have had on people online. But I'm not overjoyed and glad to be rid of it, I'm just moving on.
Or a game where your choices affect the story 
