It’s taken nearly a decade for the five acts and five interludes that make of Kentucky Route Zero’s fantastically melancholic narrative to come together, but with the release of Act 5 this week, we finally have the complete story available from beginning to end in Kentucky Route Zero: TV Edition for Switch, PS4, and Xbox One. This was my first experience with this Lynchian interactive theater experience and I found it to be as beautifully surrealistic as it is inscrutably absurd.
Kentucky Route Zero is a thematically dense representation of classism and the financial (and emotional) insecurity of the American working class, and I’m certain Academics and video game “connoisseurs” will be dissecting the layers of Kentucky Route Zero and its use of pastiche and metaphor to both complicate and support its themes for many years to come. Ultimately, I suspect the game will be mostly inaccessible to players, as high art often is, and whatever emotional resonance one gets simply through osmosis will certainly be outweighed by the dozen-or-so hours of, frankly, pretty inaccessible content. Kentucky Route Zero goes to such great lengths to unmake what a video game is that it will no doubt alienate a great many players.
Embracing The Inexplicable
Kentucky Route Zero looks like a point-and-click adventure, plays like a visual novel, but in truth is a far cry from fitting into any established genre. In fact, Kentucky Route Zero challenges the definition of what a game even is. There are no challenges, no puzzles, nothing to solve, overcome, defeat, succeed against, or figure out. There is no impact whatsoever you can make on the story, despite frequent a constant flow of dialogue choices. The choices you make don’t change how the characters interact, what they do, or how the narrative progresses; they simply exist as the choices you make. Kentucky Route Zero is more easily described as interactive theater than a video game, but even that designation would be insufficient.
Though you begin the game controlling a character named Conway, a delivery man on his last job for a doomed antique store, to say you “control” or “play as” any characters in the game would be incorrect. When you approach an “NPC” to start a conversation, sometimes you’ll choose the dialogue choices for the NPC rather than Conway. Sometimes, you’ll control both sides of a conversation, asking questions and then answering them. The “playable” character flipflops and switches around so quickly and frequently that you have no choice but to let go of any semblance of control. This is just one way that Kentucky Route Zero subverts game conventions. Kentucky Route Zero consistently and forcefully defies expectations until you are forced to abandon any concept of an expectation at all.
Conway’s goal is to make this final delivery and to do that he’ll need to travel along Route Zero, a metaphysical road that defies physics and connects the places and people Conway meets on his journey. These characters include a theremin player, a couple of androids who escape a life of slave labor through the power of music, and a little boy who’s brother is an eagle. The narrative of Kentucky Route Zero is saturated in dream logic and incoherent connective threads. The goal to make the final delivery is the only thing that grounds the player. Scenes meander from vignette to vignette of disconnected absurdism and self-indulgent tangents. If you’re along for the ride, you’ll likely best served to let the experience wash over you, clinging to anything tangible you can connect with. If you’re expecting a reveal, a payoff, something cogent that ties it all together, you’re going to be disappointed.
The Plight Of The Working Class
Being a project born out of economic anxiety during the recession, the most present and pervasive theme throughout Kentucky Route Zero is the hopelessness and struggle of American working-class people. Debt takes on a physical form, transforming one’s body into electrified skeletons. There’s a quiet acceptance around the indebted life many of the characters you meet must bear, translated as a kind of indentured servitude to the power company by way the Hard Times Distillery. “Employees” can’t even take breaks, less that add to their debt, and even the customary drink of whiskey at the start of a shift is counted against the balance due. Debt is treated as something inescapable but accepted. Tied to both duty and honor: a debt must be paid.
The way the game handles classism and economic stress is one of the more surface themes in the game, and also its most reoccurring. As someone who personally struggles with financial insecurity, the pessimism, and heavy-handedness with which the game handles these themes (the whiskey casks are literally caskets) was certainly triggering. I found I was needing to remind myself that art doesn’t need to make you feel good, and video games don’t need to be fun.
Hope, Or Something Like It
Circles are an essential part of Kentucky Route Zero’s iconography. The menu for selecting acts is a circle that leads from the end back to the beginning. The Zero itself is a circular route that goes round and round and doubles back on itself. The ending, without spoiling anything, is certainly open to interpretation, but plays on the circuitous nature of the game.
As pessimistic as I found the overall experience, it is not without moments of true beauty. The musical interludes, especially, or nothing if not stirring, to say the least. There is a certain element of making an effort to pierce through the confounding hyperreality to simply be present in the world around you. Real or fake, there’s beauty there, staring you right in the face. Those moments are my biggest take away from Kentucky Route Zero, and the ones that will stick, even If I don’t yet feel particularly compelled to revisit this experience any time soon.
Some have said Kentucky Route Zero isn’t for everyone. I maintain that it’s actually almost for no one. Whether that speaks more about the inaccessibility of the game or the interests of gamers - or perhaps even my skewed impression of what a “gamer” is - I can’t say.
What I can say, is that Kentucky Route Zero is a beautiful game. It is also a tragic game, a boring game, and perhaps not even a game at all. I love to have the discussion about art and entertainment, and I’m so happy for those who have found Kentucky Route Zero and how much it means to them. For everyone else, Kentucky Route Zero will likely fall somewhere between abstract nonsense and pretentious exceptionalism with fleeting moments of legitimate frisson.
I’m not in the unenviable position of giving a score to a game with no generic touchstones or precedence. I can’t help but laugh at the absurdity at giving a score to something like Kentucky Route Zero. Did it accomplish everything it intended to do? Almost certainly. Was it “good?” Making a qualitative determination for art almost certainly means you missed the point entirely, doesn’t it?
A Switch copy of Kentucky Route Zero: TV Edition was provided to TheGamer for this review. Kentucky Route Zero: TV Edition is available now on PC, Nintendo Switch, PS4, and Xbox One.
