Bugs chirp as a truck rolls into a darkened gas station. The name, Equus Oils, is silhouetted against a twilight sky. The sun is heavy and swollen as it lowers, casting an incongruous darkness in the foreground. A man gets out of the truck with his dog. The truck rumbles persistently. Traffic rushes by in the distance. Prompts to click a few objects come up. Click the dog. “An old dog in a straw hat,” you are told. “Both have seen better days.”

This is how the first act of Kentucky Route Zero opens, dripping in atmosphere. This point-and-click adventure game was first unveiled back in 2011, describing itself as a magical realist adventure, asking for funding on Kickstarter. It received roughly $8500, and in 2013, the first act of Kentucky Route Zero was released. It has had a long and stagnated development over the past seven years, in no small part down to the fact that developer Cardboard Computer consists of exactly three people. 

The first two acts were released roughly four months apart. This would be something that the developers came to regret, thanks to the intense crunch they put themselves through and the subsequent strain on their lives. They allowed the game to move forward at its own pace from there, much like an old dog. The third act followed in 2014, and then the fourth act released in 2016. It would be nearly four years before the fifth and final act would arrive in January 2020, published by Annapurna Interactive.

The game is now complete. It is also now the best possible time to buy and play Kentucky Route Zero. With the finalizing of the game has come a wealth of quality of life improvements, including several language localisations and audio captions for the dialogue. Audio captions are crucial for game accessibility. A game doesn’t need voice acting to be enjoyable, but to deny any form of audio captions denies those with reading or vision issues from playing the game.

I want to first address gameplay. Rather, I should mention that there isn’t much. This is a point-and-click game, not even a walking simulator. There are no puzzles to my knowledge, although the game is soaked with mystery like a grandmother’s rum cake. The entire point, (it seems) is to bathe in the setting and the mood that the game is handing to you, rolling out before you like a buffet. If you’re not willing to simply engage, let go and be enthralled by the low fantasy and American-gothic stylings, then Kentucky Route Zero will never be the game for you.

It’s also not a long game, not when played act-by-act. My experience with the first act clocked in at under an hour and I enjoyed every minute of it. Thanks to the explorative nature of it all, I’m fairly certain I didn’t see all there was to see. There’s parts of me that are nervous I missed something important. Replaying it is an extremely inviting prospect, although I’m determined to see all five acts through by themselves first.

Surreal minimalism fashions the art direction. It’s simple, but polished; aesthetically consistent. It’s inky, deep, and rich looking despite being fairly desaturated. There’s an excellent use of tones. It walks the border of horror, instilling gloomy dread and oppression that you’re never quite sure if you’re supposed to be feeling or not. It all feels inevitable, though. 

Early in the game, you wander down to the gas station basement to turn the power back on. There’s a group of friends playing a game while sitting in the dark. You hit the breakers, and music begins for the first time, shimmering it’s way around you. You head back up through the basement, and the friends are gone.

Of course they’re gone. Why wouldn’t they be gone? The music remains, though, swirling around you for the remainder of the act, working in tandem with the soft crunch and click and buzz of in-world sound to draw you in. I’ll say this: the game is best played with headphones and with the lights down.

The dog doesn’t need to have a name if you don’t want him to. The man in the truck, however, is Conway. You can shape him, his life, and his personality to an extent through the dialogue choices you make in the game. It’s hard to say who Conway really is, though. The game feels suspended in a particular reality all its own, and that nature seeps into the dialogue, layering everything strangely. I couldn’t tell you if I was really shaping Conway, or if I was helping him make up stories. 

Maybe everything he said was true in the version of things that I dictated. This liquidity in reality is further impressed upon you later, when you meet another character and control parts of both sides of the conversation, directing the flow with your own will. Is it really a conversation if you’re just a player talking to yourself?

I took Conway away from the gas station. At that point, the game is a bit of a navigation simulator. You need to remember the directions you were given to find the various places that you can visit. There are unique location and landmark names all across the map, like the Artificial Limb Factory, or the Burning Tree. Wherever you go, from an abandoned house to an abandoned mine, impressions of the dead surround you.

When you’re not guiding him through the various locations in the game, Conway is also singularly odd. Even when he remarks on the strangeness of the things going on around him, he’s not particularly concerned by them. He takes these encounters in his stride. In an empty house, you encounter a character called Weaver. “Your arrival at the Zero is basically inevitable,” she says, before disappearing.

There it was again, that sense of inevitability. Ah, the Zero. I haven’t even mentioned the main story: Conway is just a man trying to make a delivery. To make this particular delivery, he must take the Zero, a route in Kentucky. Nobody seems to be able to tell him exactly where it is, or they do and then it’s not there. You investigate what you know, where you can go, and what you find when you get there.

The feeling I have right now is that the story is almost inconsequential. Not that it doesn’t matter at all, that’s absurd in a game like this. Perhaps taking the Zero is going to be more about the journey than the destination. Does it matter if Conway makes his delivery or not? It matters more, maybe, what you and your old dog might find beyond or inside the Zero. Like in staged theatre, each location is declared a scene. Scenes within an act within an overarching play. This is just the beginning.

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Kentucky Route Zero

$24.99

9

Score

9.0/10

Pros

• Gorgeous, intangible atmosphere
• Interesting concept
• Surreal Visuals
• Lots to explore

Cons

• Sometimes janky point-and-click controls

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