And so a meandering journey comes to an end. Kentucky Route Zero, “a magical realist adventure game”, was funded, modestly, on Kickstarter back in 2012. The first of its five episodes released in early 2013, the second a few months later, the third a year after that, the fourth two years later still. Now, following the almost exponential trend, after a further three-and-a-half years, we get the game’s conclusion – alongside a new console edition of the entire series.
Kentucky Route Zero reviewDeveloper: Cardboard ComputerPublisher: Cardboard Computer (PC), Annapurna Interactive (console)Platform: Reviewed on SwitchAvailability: Act 5 released 28th January on PC. Kentucky Route Zero: TV Edition released 28th January on Switch, PS4 and Xbox One
If you’ve been following this game since the start, then, it’s been a long road, and perhaps an exasperating one. Not that this wasn’t a fitting way to experience Kentucky Route Zero’s tale of a band of misfits getting drawn into a truck driver’s quixotic quest to deliver his load of antique furniture to an address that seems to get further away with every step. Some made their peace with the open ending of the fourth act being as good a place as any to leave it – and they weren’t wrong. But I doubt they will be disappointed in the fifth act that releases this week. Strikingly different in style, it’s a gorgeous epilogue that finds resolution while resisting the urge to solve any of the game’s many mysteries.
If you’ve been on this long journey with the game, I envy you. I have played Kentucky Route Zero from start to finish in the space of a week – all five episodes, plus the four interludes that developer Cardboard Computer released for free – and I’m not sure it’s the best way to take it in. Essentially a beautifully illustrated and animated text adventure, Kentucky Route Zero is slow, whimsical, interior, elliptical and at times deliberately frustrating. It is as inspired by theatre and installation art as film or video games; it’s dense with memory, digression and fragmentary, half-remembered lore. It’s not long, but it has too little plot and too much story to be comfortably consumed in one go. Like a meal composed of dozens of dainty side-dishes, it risks leaving you stuffed but unsatisfied. Better to give each portion its space (though three-and-a-half years of space might be overdoing it), to savour the flavours that linger long after you put the game down.
Kentucky Route Zero: PC Edition Watch on YouTube
Conway, the truck driver, asks for directions at a petrol station decorated with a giant horse’s head. In the basement he has the first of many encounters with people – ghosts? – who don’t seem to exist in the same timeframe as him. He is directed to the Zero, a secret, underground, extra-dimensional highway; it’s the only way to reach his destination. Getting to the Zero won’t be easy, but navigating it and the spaces – and people – it leads to will be trickier still. He acquires a travelling companion, Shannon, who loves to repair old TV sets and sees visions of her vanished sister in the white noise. (This game has a strong retro fetish for analogue technology: cathode ray tubes, radio static, magnetic tape, theremins. The suggestion is that these old machines left more room for magic and mystery than the digital world does – a tempting, if heavily nostalgic, point of view.)