On Kentucky Route Zero

Kentucky Route Zero reminds me most strongly of the Utena movie: it boasts a painstakingly distinctive & polished art style and looks just terrific, but the thick tangle of compressed metaphors and stylistic affectations gets in the way of its human stories. The game's best chapter is its first, which follows a deliveryman for an antique shop in search of the location of his very last dropoff, which, he keeps being told, is located off the mythical "Route Zero." I enjoy settings that are specific, journeys that don't trot the entire globe like we so often see in videogames but instead explore a single location or culture in depth; while KR0's first chapter has a strong dose of magical realism, it's rooted enough in something resembling the actual Kentucky, and I enjoyed exploring the overgrown Appalachian mountains, driving down sparsely populated country roads, and learning about stuff like coal scrip. There's a real haunting sense of place as you explore out-of-the-way locations along your deliveryman's route - an abandoned church where you hear choir singing outside but discover upon entry that it's just a tape recording playing to an empty audience; a run-down convenience store with indistinct marine creatures swimming in ill-lit, murky tanks - on impulse, the deliveryman plunges his hand in one of the tanks and has a vision. There's life and civilization here in the backcountry, but it exists in lonely pockets and often resists explanation.

Subsequent chapters, though, get way more into outright fantasy, as our protagonists are carried away by giant eagles out of Lord of the Rings, get robot limbs, and visit distribution centers staffed by aliens. These ideas certainly aren't the product of an unimaginative mind (and they have, in some cases, a metaphorical purpose), but they lead the story more and more into abstraction and away from the skancewise human element that made the game's setting so affecting. Kentucky Route Zero's later chapters also have the aggravating tendency to pile on more and more characters and side objectives before the game's finished everything on its plate; as soon as you get absorbed in one storyline, the game shifts gears and says, OK, here's the next shiny thing, drop everything and fixate on this now. I understand that on-the-road stories have an inherent transience in what you see and visit, but this comes off too often in KR0 as just the result of a short attention span, reducing intriguing concepts to passing distractions.

Another aggravation was the nature of choice in the game. Choice systems in videogames come in two general varieties: either the parameters of the universe are set and you're determining your character's actions within them, or you're determining the parameters themselves. KR0 initially seems like the latter type of game: your very first option is to name your dog and establish its gender; later on, you can choose whether your characters previously got lost because they were new to the area or because they had been drinking, etc. You're defining certain parts of who your characters are, not just what they're doing during the timeframe of the game. OK, now, later in KR0, there are a couple junctures where the game makers offer an option to give one of the characters a certain backstory - which I turned down, since it would've weighed on the road story like a leaden curtain. The late third chapter, though, hinges on a "but thou must" non-choice that not only definitively establishes this backstory but cements it as the central plot of the game. It felt like an unnatural intrusion, a betrayal not only of atmosphere but of mechanics: the entirety of KR0's gameplay rests on player choices, on you writing this story (or at least its details) as you go along, but here, the writers abruptly entered the frame to render a good deal of my choices ultimately pointless and Canonically Wrong.

Still, the game looks like nothing else on the market, and there are moments and sights that aren't offered anywhere else. Videogames usually do understatement horribly, but there's an empty scene between the deliveryman and his employer, who is developing dementia, that's excellently understated, a dialogue between two people who know each other well but have nothing left to say to each other, despite desperately wanting it to be otherwise. (The scene is also memorably lit, with pale, strong morning sunlight that casts grey shadows in the foreground.) The game finds a number of original ways to direct its action, from choosing the lyrics to a song to describing the playable characters' actions in one section entirely through chatty secondhand accounts from NPCs. And there's the Zero itself, which looks to be very much like what would happen if the psychedelic continent of Mira from Baten Kaitos had a highway authority. And the game's hallmark building, a gas station shaped like a horse's head, with the structure's underground basement forming the rest of its interred body...there's a lot to like here. I was extremely aggravated during large stretches of Acts II and III, and I suspect I'll be rolling my eyes a good deal moving forward, but I don't want to ding the game too hard for its faults, since while it's a mess at times, it's one of those messes that few other titles would have the audacity to create.

(Bonus: Ever since watching this LP, I have a hard time imagining the game without the male LP partner's voices.)
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