Kentucky Route Zero is lost in the illusive premise of the American Dream but found in the elusive dream logic of its weird, wild, and wonderful prose. Through it all are characters who conceal pain and loss with whimsical musings of hope and escape and locations engulfed in a meditative haze where brutal reality is indistinguishable from isolated reverie. At the end lies a paradox that suggests a circuitous path was the shortest course to an inevitable destination, and the assurance that Kentucky Route Zero's seven-year voyage knew its direction all along.
When Kentucky Route Zero’s first act debuted in 2013, its opening scene established a premise that it respected through its fifth and final act in 2020. Kentucky Route Zero presents the player with an objective, but not an imperative. Choice is omnipresent, but its reflection may not be apparent. Plunging past dire circumstances hits identically to moving through soothing places. You can see the horizon but the path before it is obscured. Kentucky Route Zero has no interest in misdirection; it simply prefers to use the ambience of its characters and their surroundings as its primary means of expression.
It’s possible to glean all of this at Equus Oils, the rural gas station where Kentucky Route Zero’s presumed protagonist Conway and his Old Hound stop and ask for directions to a cryptic address. You’re given a destination (5 Dogwood Drive) but challenged with getting there through an enigmatic subterranean highway (the titular Zero). Conway can decide to name his hound Blue, Homer, or nothing, and it’s not clear if this will ever matter. Repairing Equus Oils’ generator reveals an ephemeral crew of D&D players in the basement, only to have their existence jovially dismissed by its proprietor, Joseph. The florid nonchalance of the dialogue and descriptions, combined with the visually striking set pieces amid fairly simple construction, leaves the player (and Conway) primed to remember what happened with their senses more than their mind.
Kentucky Route Zero would rather its player know what a wall feels like and maybe what it tastes like instead of what it looks like or what it’s doing there. It’s a somewhat radical approach in a medium that is concerned with being clear and gratifying as possible, at all times, at the risk of losing the player in the myriad of 2020’s entertainment options. Kentucky Route Zero bets the farm that its writing—and there’s quite a bit of character dialogue, idle musing, and deliberate staging—will be strong enough to support the story it aches to tell. As its strongest asset, the writing draws three dimensional characters, lets the player handle their coloring and shading, then responds by animating those decisions through a daydream narrative.
In its most basic form, Kentucky Route Zero is a point-and-click adventure game. Five acts and five interludes set the player off toward destinations loaded with character and dialogue. In some acts, this involves traveling Kentucky’s highways and the Zero in Conway’s truck and going off course to peruse locations through Twine-adjacent text adventures and occasional graphic excursions. In later acts, agency exists between where you choose to go and who you choose to talk to while you’re there. There aren’t many objective puzzles but there are plenty of curious riddles. Kentucky Route Zero is an adventure game as much as it is a walking simulator as much as it is a more lucid take on LSD Dream Emulator. It’s of the mind that it’s easier to recount the visually striking set design of Tron than recite the labyrinthine plot machinations of Tinker Tailor Solider Spy. Imagery seems more powerful than collections of facts and evidence.
Further categorizing Kentucky Route Zero opens another box of subversions. The Telltale model of Episodic Adventures Games pigeon-holed the emerging (and then collapsing) genre as a series of structurally predictable narrative stories. The concept of player choice mattered so much that games were compelled to remind you how significant those choices were at every juncture. Kentucky Route Zero allows the player to select a staggering amount of dialogue but isn’t interested in relaying if it was either incidental or monumental. The secret is that it’s neither, a trope Kentucky Route Zero overthrows by convincing the player that this story ultimately belongs to the characters. It’s the only possible reality because the prose is so thick with detail and imagery. What it feels like is more relevant to the experience than what happened.
The player’s agency in Kentucky Route Zero’s is a balancing act between supporting a plot and plotting support. Shannon Márquez, Conway’s closest tether to reality, is material to finding 5 Dogwood Drive but incidental to Conway’s destiny. It matters that Ezra’s parents are not around, but the reason they abandoned him are left to the player. Junebug and Johnny, an impossibly cool pair of rogue android musicians, are equipped for this weird world but in flux with their regard to each other. You can’t change where anyone is going, but there’s no shortage of influence in the path that brings them to their destination.
There isn’t a single character or situation that is not haunted by the standard operation of American capitalism. Kentucky Route Zero’s confirms a system designed to exploit weakness will always take advantage of the most vulnerable. Conway’s guilt and addiction is rooted in the fallibility (or non-existence) of safety nets and the failure of a social infrastructure. The absence of Ezra’s parents is directly connected to 2008’s housing crisis and the absurd inventions the worst corporations and weakest parts of the government solicited to address it. Shannon’s fractured relationship with her family presents a working class community that was chewed up and processed by the machine until everyone in it disintegrated. Their pain is clear in spite of dialogue that never questions their resolve. They’re willing to move forward, or move somewhere, even if they don’t know where they’re going.
This ethos is present near the end of Act III, when Conway and his friends visit The Hall of the Mountain King and find a collective of programmers rebuilding a doomed computer game. Donald, the project’s lead, asks the crew if they have any idea what it’s like building something and then sit powerlessly as your work declines into ruin. Conway can tell him his job won’t exist tomorrow, Shannon can reply by stating her skilled trade can’t keep the lights on, and Ezra can straight up say his family disappeared and he has no idea what to do (interestingly Junebug, born into this world, is characterized to assume all of this seems normal). Everyone here, consciously of it or not, is affected by the same plague.
Through its selected tragedies, Kentucky Route Zero’s employs magical realism as a coping mechanism. Ezra’s brother, Julian, is a gigantic eagle that shuttles foreclosed homes from a museum to a forest every single night. Conway’s mangled leg, the linchpin of his annihilation, is “fixed” by Dr. Truman and rendered a phantom translucent appendage and no one seems to notice. A boat fueled by mechanical mammoths, underground societies of indentured servants, cubicle farm offices staffed by polite bears – Kentucky Route Zero’s penchant for and fascination with surreal circumstances is perceived as entirely normal by its cast of characters. No one questions their environment, either because their trauma renders its power inert or it’s seen as a fantasy escape from the bitterness of reality.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in the second act (and the interlude that preceded it), when it’s revealed the maniacal rampage of capitalism has literally invented a new form of debt and misery to inflict upon the local populace. Eventually, one of your friends loses control and drifts away, and when someone asks where they went, the only two responses are “they took [them]” and “[they] left.” It took me quite a while to consider the best option, because both held equal amounts of truth. If there’s no way out a bind and any solution may be a comforting option, no matter how terrifying and devastating it may feel to another person, there is no correct option. It was true that they took them and it was true that they left, but it was clear they were already lost somewhere else along the way.
This console-based TV Edition of Kentucky Route Zero obscures the unconventional nature of its original release. Five episodes and their five essential interludes were delivered over the course of seven years, and it’s been nearly a decade since the project’s barely recognizable genesis on Kickstarter. Years passed between episodes in the back half of the series. As time advanced, so did the technical and narrative ambition of its creative team. Act V debuts alongside TV Edition and simultaneously presents audiences old and new with the same conclusion.
Replaying each episode, before finally experiencing Act V, reveals a singularity of course and vision as Kentucky Route Zero crosses epochs of political climates. The tone of each character and facets of their identity are consistent across each episode, but the general structure and framing devices change wildly as Kentucky Route Zero meets its conclusion. The payoff runs the risk of severe FOMO—Act IV in particular only shows half of its “content” by default—but it doesn’t compromise the impact of the final part of the story. Characters can feel complete without seeing and knowing all of their possibilities.
Kentucky Route Zero means a bit more to me because its setting is the state I have called home my entire life. I live in Louisville, far away from the rural communities Kentucky Route Zero’s characters inhabit, but I’ve been to these places and sympathize with the economic devastation that has eradicated hope from communities the eastern half of the state. On the other end of the spectrum, I’ve also been to Mammoth Cave and know the Echo River, while wildly exaggerated in Kentucky Route Zero, is a real place. Despite a thriving arcade scene, games are barely present in Kentucky and it’s even more atypical for one to depict anything happening here especially without resorting to dunking on rural stereotypes. If Nier: Automata appealed to my experience with depression and alienation, Kentucky Route Zero connects to my physical sense of place and community. It’s a shortcut to deep-rooted, and sometimes buried, emotional weight.
I came to Kentucky Route Zero in 2014, just in time for the release of Act III. I wasn’t ready for what I experienced, evident by the surprise that Junebug and Johnny’s concert in the middle of the episode—a beautiful sequence of melancholy light and magic where the player is an active participant in the lyric selection—left me as a weeping mess in a desk chair. Act III, with the support of its preceding acts, made it to the top of my year-end list and persists in my mind as, and I am not exaggerating, an emotional apex of videogames. At the time I considered Kentucky Route Zero the closest ethereal analog to Twin Peaks before it felt like every game wanted to be Twin Peaks. I still believe Kentucky Route Zero gets that mood and sentiment right while also creating an original statement, but now I think its grasp of the medium and its ability to communicate its intentions with its art and writing exceed all reasonable expectations.
I didn’t know it was going to be like this. Act IV, which released in the summer of 2016, painted a grim picture of shame and regret couched inside of a mechanically dense voyage down the Echo River. I was more interested in conclusion than catharsis because it’s a videogame and that’s how these things go. The rapid shift in paradigm and technology from Act III to Act IV—the latter was more ambitious from any critical and technical angle—left me to assume the conclusion would double-down on the weird worlds and dramatic implications that resonated in Act IV. Act V would let Act III’s concert subsist as the natural climax in a bell curve structure and soldier on as a point of finality.
And I was wrong about everything. I don’t want to say too much about Act V except that I was wrong about everything. Its framing device is as extraordinarily cute as it is smartly designed and entirely unpredictable. Individual character resolution and the reveal of 5 Dogwood Drive, in a mid-act sequence, was so idyllic and quiet and beautiful that I was again moved to tears in the same game, technically on the same day, but six years apart. I can feel myself nearing the hyperbole I (often) condemn in effusive videogame reviews, but the controlled power of Act V and the sunlight on its structures feels like it can render any captured screen as modern art that I would feel comfortable hanging on a wall. The dialogue I selected for the characters weren’t resolutions with finality, but choices that will allow them to live and continue on inside of Kentucky Route Zero’s rich fiction. That knowledge, along with the scores of light bulb revelations at the end of this journey, allowed Kentucky Route Zero to somehow stick the landing of a craft that launched and lingered for so long many, myself included, cast doubt it would ever come down in one piece.
We’re only telling you half of the stories we hear. Cate, the captain of the Mucky Mammoth ferry, tells us this at the beginning of Kentucky Route Zero’s fourth act. It’s meant to preview that act’s structure, the player can only go left or right in Act IV’s six forks, but it’s more of a statement of Kentucky Route Zero’s treatment of agency and its ability to illuminate the same story inside of dozens of different circumstances. You’re going to remember how this felt in some emotionally vulnerable part of your brain long after time erodes what ever happened to this cast of characters. Kentucky Route Zero leaves a permanent mark.
Kentucky Route Zero is lost in the illusive premise of the American Dream but found in the elusive dream logic of its weird, wild, and wonderful prose. Through it all are characters who conceal pain and loss with whimsical musings of hope and escape and locations engulfed in a meditative haze where brutal reality is indistinguishable from isolated reverie. At the end lies a paradox that suggests a circuitous path was the shortest course to an inevitable destination, and the assurance that Kentucky Route Zero’s seven-year voyage knew its direction all along.
