Describing Kentucky Route Zero feels like doing it some injustice. Kentucky Route Zero is much closer to a post-modern novel than it is a video game, but doesn't let the fact that its story is being told in an interactive medium go to waste. Kentucky is built around the idea that you will never totally capture every given route and story, because the point is to make impressions, to feel for characters whose lives you may only see snippets of. Describing any of these stories and characters becomes like capturing smoke in a net because most of what happens in the story is ephemeral, once again: impressions. I think that my description so far can be scary to some, or otherwise repulsive to those who associate descriptors like "post-modern" and "impressions" with pretentious art games that are more concerned with being smart and vague than being fun. In one sense, this is true: this is a pretentious art game, difficult in form and structure, and with so many characters that you are likely to forget some of them even when you see them again until they say some key phrase or reference that jogs your memory. But more accurately, the game is meant to be an emotional ride, one of longing and nostalgia, and a reassessment on what is lost, what we want, and the death and rebirth of the American folk spirit. Much like Twin Peaks, you don't have to be overly literate to find something enjoyable and moving in what is here because of its focus on emotional impressions and relatability even in an absurd execution, so I strongly urge you to ignore your impulse against this game and give it a shot, because you will feel something, and you won't regret it.
Kentucky Route Zero is a point and click Adventure game, roughly, and follows a group of people who each have some sense of longing toward something they seem unable to find, or even describe to themselves. All they seem to know is that something is missing in their lives, and they want to find it. You start as Conway, a man delivering some antiques to 5 Dogwood Dr., an address he can't seem to find. It's the last delivery for his friend and boss' business before she finally calls it quits, and he wants to get it over with even as he has no idea where his life will go after this. You pull over at a gas station and ask the owner there where to find the address, who tells you in order to get there you must go on the Zero, an underground highway that travels through the caverns underneath Kentucky which doesn't seem to obey the general rules of physics. Traveling the Zero leads Conway to collect a group of people each looking for something themselves. It's like The Odyssey only through American folk beliefs instead of Greek mythology. Notably it isn't American folklore, but rather a general ethos of rustic America. Stories begin to weave in and out about struggling blue collar workers and their plight for a good life, about debt and the way it ensnares people, corporate entities that cut corners and pressured people into a compromised life, and of academics who have abandoned the city in favor of chasing metaphysics, artistic expression, paranormal research, and a general excavation of the unknown. It is a game that desires to wander, its people want meaning, and they want to passionately tail that meaning without concern for how that meaning is contextualized by some governing entity. They want something pure, real, and torturous if it must be as long as it is free of artificial restraint and that it is theirs.
The story also finds itself antagonistic to restraint in its telling. There are five acts throughout, but more accurately, there are five acts and five shorts between each that are equally important to the world we are traversing. I found all but maybe one or two of these between-acts to be incredibly poignant, and sometimes even act as Rosetta Stone to the game's bizarre execution. In the first of these between-acts, you control Emily as she and her friends explore an art installation at a museum (Emily is one of those characters you've met already, but may not notice at first). The different exhibits are exceptionally strange and, to be honest, impossible in real life, and has a distinct David Foster Wallace or Thomas Pynchon vibe of going beyond reality to create an impression rather than to convince you of realism. The absurdity of these art pieces prompt Emily's dialogue box, and you can either attempt to interpret the art (usually rather pretentiously), give a general but less intellectual sounding opinion, or be dismissive. The game is trying to get you thinking about why the game's story is being told so unconventionally, about what different approaches could mean, and that it doesn't really matter so much that you need to over-analyze it. You are free to take the game's oddities seriously or not, all that matters is you play it and you feel something. But importantly, the game asks that you allow any way of looking at it with some respect, like there are no wrong answers. Giving you the choice allows you to express your perspective on it in game in a bit of meta fiction, but also implies that there were other choices that others could take, and that they have equal validity. This also introduces us to several characters we will meet later in the game, although it would be no shame if you didn't notice later when you meet them, since this sort of thing happens multiple times, and after awhile it can become overwhelming. These side episodes will often introduce or mention characters you will meet later or have met before, but may not have seen in awhile. They are meant to wet your lips before the next big swig comes along, especially since the game most certainly has some sharp turns to make in whichever Act is upcoming. They act as palate cleansers with a lead off, warming you up for what is coming to some degree or another. After the first between-act section, the artist whose art you were viewing shows up, and you now have some frame of reference as to who she is, and some context as to why she is here in this office building so deep under ground. The game is always easing you into things, even while a certain sense of reality begins to fray at the edges.
Acts are divided into scenes, of which each has a location. These locations act as sets, and as the story develops you may become more and more aware that this game feels more like an interactive play than it does a game, book, or movie. Sets will peel away walls or rotate around flaming spires, but they still feel distinctly like sets, albeit sets that could never work on any stage in the world. Likewise, dialog dictates most of what goes on in a scene. What people have to say and the potential contrast to what they think is important to how the story plays out. Often times you will find yourself controlling Conway or another character like Shannon, and the dialog options you have to say all mostly feel like canon. It feels like you are sifting through their thoughts and choosing which is the most appropriate or most interesting for the given situation, but you will never pick the choice that feels as though you are saying everything. There are moments where this meta-storytelling gives way to actual choice, where you can make decisions for people or where you can dictate their past, and these have an even bigger impact as a piece of meta-storytelling. Obviously, games are usually about choice, and thus are more akin to choose your own adventure novels than novels themselves, but the approach of Kentucky Route Zero to choice is interesting in how it defines characters you meet. By being able to choose form a handful of responses that illuminate intention, desire, and past, you are essentially being given the job of co-writer, albeit in a very limited way. By including you in the creative output of the game, the game is smartly engaging you in a way most games, books, or movies try but rarely achieve with a general populace. Nothing is static in the art world, it is always participatory. You have to give into a given work what you get out of it, and a lot of even the most pretentious of media foodies seem to miss this most important point.
Video games have the luxury of requiring user input and so heavily implying or requiring audience participation, but rarely is it so encouraged on a creative level. When we interpret art, if you will allow me this slight digression, it isn't that one interpretation (or even method of interpretation, as can be found all over YouTube) is correct, but rather that it is a set of rules with a particular, artistic meaning as its outcome. Each interpretation is both rules and execution of those rules, and when we debate interpretation we either debate the rules or the other's ability in following those rules with a given work. We can have preference for particular methodology, but that does not make it inherently right because there is no inherently right way of doing so. We can assume or intuit an author's preferred methodology (such as when I ignored poor controls in Evoland knowing they weren't really important to the work's perspective on the point), but even that does not give it a concrete preference as to how we should view a given work. Kentucky Route Zero addresses this time and again.
The game reflects on its odd presentation, reflects on the way it constructs its characters, reflects on reflection, and within this miasma of how do we understand art, how do we apply art, how do we live with art that reminds us of the urgency we feel to better our lives and the lives of others is a story of that same longing, of that wish to understand, of a need for some rubric for interpretation and the desperation for some meaning in it all. But most of all it is a ghost story. It is a remembrance of what is dead, and that if we are to find meaning and we are to find some solace in this wicked storm we will have to build it ourselves. Reflection is paramount to this, where we see the error of the past, where desperation and longing lead to easy answers that bit their participants in the ass and subjugated them the way we feel subjugated now. History repeats itself, but so long as we keep history in our mind we may have a clearer path forward. Do we start over or do we try somewhere else, look for new stimuli to help us along? Ultimately it is your choice, but regardless of how you decide to go, we all share the reflection and we all share the search, and so long as we see that in one another there is a community to be had, and a eulogy to be said, one of sadness and one of hope.
10
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