Kentucky Route Zero.......
“When will you finish?” wonders Philippa Warr as she explores four of the five episodes of the magical realism game that’s a bit performance art, too.
Normally magical realism sends us into a fit of rage, but in this case we’re happy waiting for over three years to finish a game that has you questioning reality itself. ,
Descend into an otherworldly tale in which an antiques deliveryman searches for an address that may not be real. The only way to reach it is via a similarly existentially challenged highway: Route Zero. What follows is a dream-like journey through a rural nightscape, evocatively rendered in an aliased vector style and accompanied by swelling ambient score.
There are no explicit puzzles here, except for the meaning of the things you experience along the way or riddles proffered by your occasional companions. Characters fade from reality like apparitions, a radio booms out choral music in a deserted church, a burning tree marks a turning along the highway, and an old tannoy pings the depths of a disused mine, stirring memories of a forgotten disaster.
With words like ‘magic realism’ being used to describe KentuckyRouteZero, you might fear a whistlestop nothing-iswhat-it-seems tour through an is-itisn’t-it unreality. And though you do get that, the game’s creators are subtle, thoughtful and manipulative with it.
Rather than beating you round the head with philosophy, the game weaves a charming spell from the first moment deliveryman Conway’s truck pulls into a gas station. Text actions shun the traditional minimalism of point-andclick language for more evocative options. An in-game computer, activated by clicking a symbol rather than selecting any “use x with z” syntax, doesn’t do anything so mundane as turning on. Rather, it “wakens from its reverie” and demands a piece of blank verse as a password which you yourself construct line-by-line from a succession of options.
Complementing the text are the animated visual shifts that push your focus from one space to another. An attempt to tune a malfunctioning TV set causes the wall behind to disassemble, revealing more clearly the night-time landscape, which is also depicted on the small, fritzing box. Elsewhere, blooms of distant music or the chirruping of crickets draw you further into this strange, moonlit otherworld.
Around halfway through the first act, Kentucky Route Zero’ s facility for creating contemplation reveals itself fully. Conway uses the echoes from a tannoy to check the structural integrity of an abandoned mineshaft. The player selects from dialogue choices as Conway mumbles into the microphone, and, regardless of which you pick, a groan reverberates through in the darkness. The selection isn’t important to move the game forwards, nor does it have any impact on the events that ensue. It exists only to make Conway your own private creation.
Creating an environment where the player falls so easily into introspection is
Kentucky Route Zero’ s major triumph. But its succession of poetic images might also prove bewildering, perhaps even aimless, when so unchained from a sense of narrative causality. There are moments, too, when the rhythm of the narrative and the rhythm of the game come into conflict – segments involving wilfully slow physical movement test your patience, for instance – but its spell is rarely broken and the discord soon recedes.
Kentucky Route Zero funnels you along a prescribed path, sparsely populated with commands and with little room for manoeuvre. But there’s beauty in how it acknowledges these limitations and asks what sort of game choices are really the most important. Editor’ s Note: This original review was posted January 2013 based on Act I. Act IV was released July 2016, and the wait for Act Vis still ongoing, making its development as much a performance art as the game itself ...