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Kentucky Route Zero
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
December 17, 2020
What is it: The best thing I've read in years. Also a magical realist/Southern Gothic road trip through the Heartland. Also a collection of poetry. Also a play, in which you are both actor and audience. Also a museum experience and some academic essays. Also a... oh, wait, did I mention that this is a point-and-click adventure game?
Why I love it: At the center-point of Kentucky Route Zero, I found myself in a bar called "The Lower Depths" as the lights dimmed and two robot musicians took the stage to play to an otherwise empty room. As the synths kick in, the ceiling falls away to reveal stars wheeling overhead. And just when I settle in to listen to the musicians, I'm asked to choose the lyrics they'll sing.
There are a handful of games that I'd point to that have shown me new potential for games and how games communicate--Papers, Please pitting mechanical choices and a desire for mechanical excellence against human choices and a willingness to make sacrifices; Hyper Light Drifter's difficulty and level design pushing the player to experience struggling with a constant fear of death, as the developer experiences his heart condition; The Witness revealing gradually that playing a game is surrendering your will and thought process to the will and thought process of the game's designer; etc.
But there are very few games I've played that have shown me new potential for written language. Kentucky Route Zero is one of those very few games.
KR0 is an adventure game (which makes it similar to experiences like Choose Your Own Adventure books, for those not familiar with video game genres). But where adventure games largely involve choosing what happens next in the plot, KR0's plot is fixed. The choices you make are, instead, entirely performative. It's not a game about deciding what happens but, rather, how it happens. No, that's not quite right either. It's not a game about deciding how it happens but, rather, how the story is told, how a line of dialogue is phrased, how a motif recurs or does not recur, how a character might reach a key insight or not reach a key insight.
That alone would win me over and be a game worth playing, but KR0 takes these performative choices and runs with them. The song in "The Lower Depths" with the choice of lyrics is a perfect example. The choices you're given of each line in the song aren't going to change the overall plot progression of the game. So, your agency in the scene is strictly performative. But consider that the song runs something like six minutes, has a handful of verses, each verse has multiple lines you can choose, and all of it is recorded and performed so that you seamlessly hear what you've chosen. That means there's dozens (hundreds?) of permutations of the song, depending on your decisions. It is a strictly performative choice, but it puts you, the player, in the role of songwriter, of poet. Playing the game becomes participating in a creative act, not playing a designer's experience but creating yours with the words the designer gives you. "The Lower Depths" is only one example of many, each of which takes a different form--a text-based adventure game within the game, or defining the tragic backstory of a key character, or stating aloud the meaning of it all in the final scenes, and tons more.
These performative choices throughout KR0 foreground the power of language. What happens isn't nearly as important as the words we use to communicate about what happens, and to communicate about ourselves.
This is a remarkable claim, as the themes that run throughout KR0 include stories and memories as kinds of debt, addiction as a kind of debt, the grip debt (of any kind) holds over people, the distance between the academic world and the real world, the crippling weight of healthcare and housing in a post-recession economy, the value of creative acts even in seeming isolation, the value of community even in seeming isolation, the many and varied roles of technology in rural communities, and the quiet background hum of faith running through it all. It's tackling basically every core theme in the modern history of the American Midwest. And its answer is to empower the player not to change the course of events, but to take control of the way those events are told, the way they are understood, the way they are remembered, all by taking control of the language used in play.
And I haven't even begun to talk about the Classical allusions, the role of Christianity throughout, the academic meta-analysis that comes up multiple times, the role of magical realism genre conventions or Southern Gothic genre conventions or ghost story genre conventions, the interlude that's played in a phone menu, the bluegrass band playing folk hymns...
I genuinely don't think Wired's review of the game is overstating it to suggest that Kentucky Route Zero might be the next Great American Novel. It's by far the best thing I've read (or played) in an extremely long time, an experience that is haunting and moving, and an experience that has changed how I see the community around me as well as how I see the tools that language provides that community.
You might also like: If you're looking strictly for books, Kentucky Route Zero is somewhere in between Jorge Luis Borges, Flannery O'Connor, and Thornton Wilder, with maybe a dash of T.S. Eliot. If you're looking at games, honestly KR0 is head and shoulders above the rest, but there are other games that reveal novel potential for language, like 80 Days or Elegy for a Dead World or even something like Her Story and Telling Lies.
Also, if you've played the game or don't mind spoilers, this long-form video essay is incredible.
Why I love it: At the center-point of Kentucky Route Zero, I found myself in a bar called "The Lower Depths" as the lights dimmed and two robot musicians took the stage to play to an otherwise empty room. As the synths kick in, the ceiling falls away to reveal stars wheeling overhead. And just when I settle in to listen to the musicians, I'm asked to choose the lyrics they'll sing.
There are a handful of games that I'd point to that have shown me new potential for games and how games communicate--Papers, Please pitting mechanical choices and a desire for mechanical excellence against human choices and a willingness to make sacrifices; Hyper Light Drifter's difficulty and level design pushing the player to experience struggling with a constant fear of death, as the developer experiences his heart condition; The Witness revealing gradually that playing a game is surrendering your will and thought process to the will and thought process of the game's designer; etc.
But there are very few games I've played that have shown me new potential for written language. Kentucky Route Zero is one of those very few games.
KR0 is an adventure game (which makes it similar to experiences like Choose Your Own Adventure books, for those not familiar with video game genres). But where adventure games largely involve choosing what happens next in the plot, KR0's plot is fixed. The choices you make are, instead, entirely performative. It's not a game about deciding what happens but, rather, how it happens. No, that's not quite right either. It's not a game about deciding how it happens but, rather, how the story is told, how a line of dialogue is phrased, how a motif recurs or does not recur, how a character might reach a key insight or not reach a key insight.
That alone would win me over and be a game worth playing, but KR0 takes these performative choices and runs with them. The song in "The Lower Depths" with the choice of lyrics is a perfect example. The choices you're given of each line in the song aren't going to change the overall plot progression of the game. So, your agency in the scene is strictly performative. But consider that the song runs something like six minutes, has a handful of verses, each verse has multiple lines you can choose, and all of it is recorded and performed so that you seamlessly hear what you've chosen. That means there's dozens (hundreds?) of permutations of the song, depending on your decisions. It is a strictly performative choice, but it puts you, the player, in the role of songwriter, of poet. Playing the game becomes participating in a creative act, not playing a designer's experience but creating yours with the words the designer gives you. "The Lower Depths" is only one example of many, each of which takes a different form--a text-based adventure game within the game, or defining the tragic backstory of a key character, or stating aloud the meaning of it all in the final scenes, and tons more.
These performative choices throughout KR0 foreground the power of language. What happens isn't nearly as important as the words we use to communicate about what happens, and to communicate about ourselves.
This is a remarkable claim, as the themes that run throughout KR0 include stories and memories as kinds of debt, addiction as a kind of debt, the grip debt (of any kind) holds over people, the distance between the academic world and the real world, the crippling weight of healthcare and housing in a post-recession economy, the value of creative acts even in seeming isolation, the value of community even in seeming isolation, the many and varied roles of technology in rural communities, and the quiet background hum of faith running through it all. It's tackling basically every core theme in the modern history of the American Midwest. And its answer is to empower the player not to change the course of events, but to take control of the way those events are told, the way they are understood, the way they are remembered, all by taking control of the language used in play.
And I haven't even begun to talk about the Classical allusions, the role of Christianity throughout, the academic meta-analysis that comes up multiple times, the role of magical realism genre conventions or Southern Gothic genre conventions or ghost story genre conventions, the interlude that's played in a phone menu, the bluegrass band playing folk hymns...
I genuinely don't think Wired's review of the game is overstating it to suggest that Kentucky Route Zero might be the next Great American Novel. It's by far the best thing I've read (or played) in an extremely long time, an experience that is haunting and moving, and an experience that has changed how I see the community around me as well as how I see the tools that language provides that community.
You might also like: If you're looking strictly for books, Kentucky Route Zero is somewhere in between Jorge Luis Borges, Flannery O'Connor, and Thornton Wilder, with maybe a dash of T.S. Eliot. If you're looking at games, honestly KR0 is head and shoulders above the rest, but there are other games that reveal novel potential for language, like 80 Days or Elegy for a Dead World or even something like Her Story and Telling Lies.
Also, if you've played the game or don't mind spoilers, this long-form video essay is incredible.
April 27, 2022
The greatest book I’ve ever played.
March 8, 2025
*Rating for video game
November 14, 2021
I often wonder how long it takes for something to be considered “great literature.” Kentucky Route Zero is recent and not typical literature, but it is entirely classical, poignant, relevant, and foundational. Spaces and places are what we make, choice is gone, reflection is in. I’d entirely recommend to everyone I meet to try to spend some time looking into this beautiful piece of literature.
Be curious on your journey.
Be curious on your journey.
June 28, 2021
"Do you have any debts?
I owe some people some apologies."
"Two shirtless, shoeless men push a light aircraft along the highway. Occasionally, one or the other slips a bit on the sweating asphalt, or stops to pull back his hair.
The men are nearly broken."
I owe some people some apologies."
"Two shirtless, shoeless men push a light aircraft along the highway. Occasionally, one or the other slips a bit on the sweating asphalt, or stops to pull back his hair.
The men are nearly broken."
March 22, 2022
the first videogame i've finished in about 4 years and it's gonna be a hard one to top
April 23, 2020
This was a really good read, and a good lot of other experiences in pictures and sounds. Gives me this strange inspired feeling every time i pick it up.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews