January 28 sees the culmination of Cardboard Computer’s seven-year journey down Kentucky Route Zero, with the game’s fifth act shipping along with a console port for the Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One. It’s been quite a ride, and looking back makes a very strong case for KRZ as one of the smartest and most prescient games of the new century thus far. Our editors recently playing it again on Nintendo Switch as a single, cohesive experience have only reaffirmed this belief. How does a point-and-click adventure, a genre thought dead for decades, win such high praise? Read on and we’ll take you on a relatively spoiler-free journey through the game’s concepts and themes.
The Gist
Kentucky Route Zero casts you as Conway, a truck driver tasked with making a delivery from an antique store to an address that can only be reached by driving the titular road. As he travels, Conway crosses paths with a variety of characters who help and hinder him on his travels, from a musical duo to a computer scientist obsessed with black mold.
KRZ isn’t about challenge – the game is a very forgiving point and click adventure, and you can’t get railroaded into a “bad ending.” You can’t get stuck. You don’t have to manage an inventory or statistics. Instead, it’s about soaking in the atmosphere and the experience, taking your time to get to know the people around you and the places you visit.
The developers, emboldened by the success of Telltale’s episodic The Walking Dead the year before, announced that they would do the same with their game, completing all five segments within a year. That, obviously, didn’t happen, but the extra time in the oven served to build the legend around Kentucky Route Zero, making each installment truly feel special.
Job System
Although the world of Kentucky Route Zero is strange and surreal, the majority of the game’s characters spend their day doing what most of us already do: work. Jobs, how they change and how they change you are a major part of the world here. Conway, our initial protagonist, is perched upon a precipice. He’s an older man who has been driving a truck his whole life, but with his employer going out of business, that leaves him adrift in the world with no way to earn a living.
Other characters you meet are facing similar problems. Shannon, a self-employed TV repairwoman, is about to lose the lease on her shop. The musicians, Johnny and Junebug, consistently play to almost empty houses. Everybody is doing their best to get by, but nobody’s guaranteed to succeed, or even survive.
The message is no matter how good you are at your job, or how much satisfaction it gives you, you are always at the mercy of external forces that wield power on a level greater than anything you could imagine. At the heart of seemingly everything is Consolidated Power, a massive corporation with tendrils extending into every aspect of KRZ‘s world. The last decade has seen a spectacular contraction in the halls of power, with corporations like Google and Facebook growing to dominate so much of how we live, and the game deals with that in an oblique and fascinating way.
Financial Crisis
At its heart, Kentucky Route Zero is that most classic of video game padding mechanics: a fetch quest. The protagonist is given an item to take from point A to point B to receive a reward. If you’ve ever sank more than a few hours into a role-playing game, chances are you’re already sick of them. But KRZ stands out by examining exactly what it means to travel, and why people do it.
In contrast to dramatized tales of migration, where people are forced to flee their homes because of drugs, wars, or drug wars, the force at the heart of Kentucky Route Zero‘s movement is one that significantly more Americans have personal experience with: debt. Nearly all of the characters you meet are walking the razor’s edge of total financial collapse. Conway’s about to lose his job because the store he works for is closing. Later in the series, he takes a step to avoid medical debt after an injury that drastically affects his future.
Video games have dealt with debt before, as any Animal Crossing fan knows, but few of them have managed to capture the dread and despair that it brings to you. Conway is literally eaten away by it, by the game’s fourth chapter reduced to a shadow of his former self. The way Conway handles the situation is quintessentially American, a dispirited resignation that it’s just the way things have to be.
It’s something we can all relate to. According to Northwestern Mutual’s 2018 Planning & Progress Study, the average American is carrying $38,000 in personal debt, excluding home mortgages. That’s a significant part of an average salary, and it’s only increasing year after year. And as the wealth gap grows, with the top 1% holding more and more as the rest of us have less, the ability to finally leave that debt behind becomes more and more fantastic.
No Turning Back
Most point-and-click adventure games are designed to funnel players towards solving puzzles, so when you engage in dialogue with NPCs it takes a looping format, so you can exhaust all possible options and make sure you get necessary information. One thing that makes Kentucky Route Zero so compelling is how it dispenses with that deeply unnatural construction to present conversations that feel normal and natural, no matter how weird their subject matter.
Like in most adventure games, you pick your character’s spoken response from a menu of possibilities. But once you pick one, you’re done – you don’t have the opportunity to try out other lines of inquiry or responses. So there are things you’re going to miss, and that’s OK. None of us can ever perfectly know another person, and the brilliant scripting here bears that out.
It would be easy to make this dialogue unimportant, but behind the scenes the game is keeping a massive database of everything you’ve said and everything you’ve seen, and it dips back into it later on to remind you, directly or obliquely, of your choices and bonds. It’s a remarkably rich technique that makes the surreal world feel more cohesive and real, which leads us into our next point.
A Cluttered World
In a typical video game, objects are divided into two categories: stuff you can use and stuff you can’t. Stuff you can use is typically health, ammunition, keycards and the like, while stuff you can’t is lore and window dressing. Not having an inventory system, Kentucky Route Zero doesn’t need to have stuff at all. But it does – the game’s world is, like ours, simply overwhelming with objects and items that your characters can poke around.
Like dialogue, the game tracks everything you looked at and fiddled with, and it can re-appear in different ways as you travel down the Zero. Most of the things in our life we don’t use, really, but we store them in our memory and affect how we see the world. It’s a fascinating way to make everything you do feel meaningful without becoming binary good and bad choices.
One of the reasons the game took so long to finish is that the developers created a ton of stuff that you won’t see unless you do a few specific things. And Kentucky Route Zero is fine with that, as should you be. Despite the narrative being linear, replaying just to poke around in different corners, explore the map and get more of its unique experience is absolutely worthwhile.
Journey’s End
One of the most exciting things about the last chapter of Kentucky Route Zero releasing is seeing if Cardboard Computer can stick the landing. They’ve already done a great job at making each episode feel like a solid, satisfying, self-contained narrative, but tying up threads – especially ones that are so strongly drawn – can be difficult. One would think that the delivery will have to make its way to the house on Dogwood Drive, but what is inside the box? Who is waiting for it? And what do we do next?
Without presenting any spoilers, those questions might linger in your mind long after you close out of Kentucky Route Zero. But, like every fetch quest, the destination wasn’t the important part. Instead, it’s about what happened to you on the way.
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