![]() Kentucky Route Zero’s approach to player choice is fascinating because it is impossible to optimize outcomes. Other options – particularly in Act IV – are important because they lead to certain scenes at the exclusion of others. Some choices have immediate outcomes, like deciding which lyrics come next in the song you’re hearing. This can come from something as simple as deciding a mundane detail about a character’s past, like why Conway’s parents were reluctant to let him watch TV. The writing deftly portrays a bleak world with lonely inhabitants, and though your decisions can’t exactly change that, you aren’t just advancing text like a visual novel. You start by controlling Conway at the gas station, but you dip in and out of the lives of many others as the cast expands over the course of five acts. The story unfolds primarily through text boxes and dialogue choices. ![]() It is focused intently on ideas rather than traditional puzzles or obstacles – but as a piece of interactive art, it’s poignant and enthralling. In short, Kentucky Route Zero is delightfully weird. You drive down extra-dimensional highways, watch experimental performances, and question the shape of reality. You meet android musicians, a giant eagle, and glowing skeletons. At its most fantastic, it is a collage of pure dream logic. At its most grounded, Kentucky Route Zero is an adventure game suffused with magical realism. If that all sounds too ambiguous and artsy, then this game may not be for you. Think of Kentucky Route Zero like taking a road trip, but the places where you stop are only half the fun the other half is deciphering the signs and arrows along the way, contemplating what lies beyond the horizon of the roads you’re not taking. Plot beats punctuate the journey, but the evocative scenery, bizarre mysteries, and imaginative writing are even more compelling. That’s the game’s narrative frame, but with each passing scene, you learn Kentucky Route Zero is about other things – like community, debts, and uncertainty. The man’s name is Conway, and he needs directions to 5 Dogwood Drive so he can make his final delivery of antique furniture. As Kentucky Route Zero opens, an aging delivery man with a faithful dog by his side pulls his truck into a gas station.
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