The vast menagerie of characters Conway meets on this journey contain multitudes their dwellings and belongings are full of histories and unresolved relationships. ![]() It shows you exactly how it's going to try and sway you from the end goal time and time again. Why, exactly, is there a D&D game happening in another dimension? You never quite know-there are, admittedly, some long threads to pull on in this game that lead nowhere, and although that's deliberate, it is occasionally frustrating-but that deceptively simple task is what passes for a tutorial in Kentucky Route Zero. There, while flipping the circuit breakers, you come across and invisibly assist in grabbing some fallen dice for what appears to be a D&D game in progress in another dimension. Then the power goes out, and Conway has to make his way into the gas station's mineshaft-turned-basement after the lights suddenly shut off. In the first area of the game, Conway has a talk with a friendly gas station attendant about the road, about old age, about poetry, even. All that added potential context really takes effort to ignore. Every area has one interaction that will advance the story, but there are a dozen other objects to examine, a dozen other NPC stories to hear, or a dozen other switches and buttons and context-sensitive areas to walk that shift the perspective of the entire area. But staying on task is harder than it seems. It's fairly linear when it comes to the particulars of making progress either a tiny box will come up at your destination telling you to click on it to proceed, or you can simply run through every option until you proceed anyway. You navigate the Zero-in all of its fever-dream weirdness-primarily through dialogue trees and old-school adventure game mechanics. Every major beat of Conway's journey is punctuated by American requiems, ranging from mournful bluegrass elegies about people time forgot, sung by shadowy riverfolk, to ethereal love songs so powerful the skies literally open up over the stage to accept them. Their stories are underscored by soul-shaking music that only the wrinkled and withered remember or perform. Hiding behind all of it are old creaky workers lamenting that they never earned enough to move away and coal miners crushed to death after giving their blood and sweat to a corporation they will never stop owing money to. The Zero is, essentially, America's purgatory, a place that looks like cubist paintings of Silent Hill, and sounds like detuned radios and the white noise of old TVs. However, the road to the delivery address on 5 Dogwood Drive takes him through the Zero, an abstract Kentucky highway where, it seems, all things obsolete-people, places, objects-come to make residence. Its protagonist, a grizzled, tired delivery truck driver named Conway, is headed in the same direction.Ĭonway ends up here making his final delivery for his friend Lysette's antique store, after which he intends to retire. Its version of Kentucky is a nothing-place of American dreams breathing their last, if they're not already dead. Beyond the various oddities and nonsensical moments, at its heart it's a game about American progress and the corpses it leaves in its wake, a pensive Wizard of Oz-like point-and-click adventure through a country whose yellow brick road is built on futile hopes and unanswered prayers. That sense of impermanence is such a crucial part of Kentucky Route Zero, more so now that it's a complete work with a full arc and definitive ending. Even when the game's at its most peaceful and gentle, it never quite feels stable or permanent, like everything good, bad, strange, or affecting that happens in the next five acts could disappear into the darkness at any moment. ![]() The game knocks you off-kilter in the first seconds, placing you in the last fading glow of sunlight before nightfall on a threadbare stretch of road. That Kentucky Route Zero's very first image is a gas station at twilight is apt. Depending on the road, it can be the only point of light for miles and miles, and beyond is nothing but an infinite abyss of curves and strange noises in between you and your destination. There's always something deeply unnerving about a gas station at night.
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