Kentucky Route Zero
Dec. 26th, 2020 11:41 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ravenSo I made the post about Kentucky Route Zero after all! Here it is, after a Boxing Day spent entirely eating cheese, hi.
Kentucky Route Zero is a game in five parts, which were released one by one at random intervals between 2013 and 2020. The whole thing is reasonably short - I played it in ten hours across two days - and is basically just point and click. You click, interact with objects and people, move around a bit. No puzzles, no combat, not even that much open-world exploration, it’s just.... clicking stuff. I tell you all this plus the fact I haven’t played any video games other than this one since 1999 to dissuade anyone of the idea that this is actually a review of a video game. I’m too inept to play video games and this isn’t really one anyway.
So, uh, with all that out of the way, Kentucky Route Zero is allegedly about a truck driver called Conway who has got lost somewhere on Interstate Route 66 in Kentucky. He’s meant to be delivering a load of antique furniture somewhere nearby for his employer and he can’t find the address. After wandering around for a while he pulls in for directions at a place called Equus Oils, which is a building-sized metal sculpture of a horse that is also a gas station. (Really.) The owner directs him to the Zero, which is a highway, kind of; it might just be a place; it’s underground, except it isn’t really. There’s also a river, the Echo. (The Echo has a local tourism helpline: Here And There Along The Echo.) And as well as the Zero and the Echo, there’s a town, which has no name and no roads, on a day after a terrible storm.
Like… that is not a helpful summary! But the game is just so emphatically resistant to a straightforward linear story and a simple explanation for anything it seems silly to try and give it one here. It has a meandering backstory that includes, among other things: a public access channel that ran on a shoestring and kept on having its network transmissions jammed by a ghost; a boy whose parents disappeared and whose brother is a giant bird; a semi-sentient supercomputer created by three feuding researchers, that collapsed and seemed to take a section of reality with it; an organisation called the Bureau of Reclaimed Spaces, which changes old places into unwanted new places, and itself is a five-storey building inside a cathedral; a riverboat that is also a giant metal sculpture of a woolly mammoth; a funeral for some horses and a dog in a hat.
The thing is, this isn’t just an unstructured parade of weirdness? All these people and things are related to two large grasping corporations: the Consolidated Power Company, which was a mining corporation that destroyed the economy of its company towns and then withdrew to leave them to pick up the pieces; and the Hard Times Distillery, which is a whisky distillery that puts its employees into indentured servitude. We never hear much about either of them: what we do hear about is what they’ve left in their wake, all these liminal spaces that people have been forced into by capitalism and debt, and the post-industrial landscape that has also been left behind. It’s metaphorical, but not general: it’s a story of Appalachia, and the American South. A friend elsewhere called the game a love letter to the South, and my response was that it feels like a privilege, to be invited in to the culture of the South in this way. There is a lot of music in the game, all of which is very cool (two of the characters are roaming robot musicians!) but my favourite bits are the rearrangements of old Southern spirituals, performed in-game by a band called the Bedquilt Ramblers who then enter the story later on in a way I will not spoil but gave me chills down my spine.
It's not a satisfying narrative in some ways, and honestly I have no idea how it rates as a game. But on the narrative side I figure that that's the point. I read an article a while back that reminded me about Centralia, the Pennsylvania mining town that was evacuated from 1962 onwards because there's a fire burning underneath it that will burn for a thousand years, and I really felt the parallel: it's a story unfinished because the post-industrial existence it depicts is itself a story unfinished. It's not the kindest choice to the gamer, because you wander off with your head and heart hurting a bit, but the story does end in a beautiful, graceful place, and artistically I think it's a wonder.
Anyway, I have no idea if that will actually persuade anyone to play this game, but I liked it a lot! It's on sale on Steam right now and you can actually play the interludes - little minigames between the acts - for free, including Here And There Along The Echo.
Kentucky Route Zero is a game in five parts, which were released one by one at random intervals between 2013 and 2020. The whole thing is reasonably short - I played it in ten hours across two days - and is basically just point and click. You click, interact with objects and people, move around a bit. No puzzles, no combat, not even that much open-world exploration, it’s just.... clicking stuff. I tell you all this plus the fact I haven’t played any video games other than this one since 1999 to dissuade anyone of the idea that this is actually a review of a video game. I’m too inept to play video games and this isn’t really one anyway.
So, uh, with all that out of the way, Kentucky Route Zero is allegedly about a truck driver called Conway who has got lost somewhere on Interstate Route 66 in Kentucky. He’s meant to be delivering a load of antique furniture somewhere nearby for his employer and he can’t find the address. After wandering around for a while he pulls in for directions at a place called Equus Oils, which is a building-sized metal sculpture of a horse that is also a gas station. (Really.) The owner directs him to the Zero, which is a highway, kind of; it might just be a place; it’s underground, except it isn’t really. There’s also a river, the Echo. (The Echo has a local tourism helpline: Here And There Along The Echo.) And as well as the Zero and the Echo, there’s a town, which has no name and no roads, on a day after a terrible storm.
Like… that is not a helpful summary! But the game is just so emphatically resistant to a straightforward linear story and a simple explanation for anything it seems silly to try and give it one here. It has a meandering backstory that includes, among other things: a public access channel that ran on a shoestring and kept on having its network transmissions jammed by a ghost; a boy whose parents disappeared and whose brother is a giant bird; a semi-sentient supercomputer created by three feuding researchers, that collapsed and seemed to take a section of reality with it; an organisation called the Bureau of Reclaimed Spaces, which changes old places into unwanted new places, and itself is a five-storey building inside a cathedral; a riverboat that is also a giant metal sculpture of a woolly mammoth; a funeral for some horses and a dog in a hat.
The thing is, this isn’t just an unstructured parade of weirdness? All these people and things are related to two large grasping corporations: the Consolidated Power Company, which was a mining corporation that destroyed the economy of its company towns and then withdrew to leave them to pick up the pieces; and the Hard Times Distillery, which is a whisky distillery that puts its employees into indentured servitude. We never hear much about either of them: what we do hear about is what they’ve left in their wake, all these liminal spaces that people have been forced into by capitalism and debt, and the post-industrial landscape that has also been left behind. It’s metaphorical, but not general: it’s a story of Appalachia, and the American South. A friend elsewhere called the game a love letter to the South, and my response was that it feels like a privilege, to be invited in to the culture of the South in this way. There is a lot of music in the game, all of which is very cool (two of the characters are roaming robot musicians!) but my favourite bits are the rearrangements of old Southern spirituals, performed in-game by a band called the Bedquilt Ramblers who then enter the story later on in a way I will not spoil but gave me chills down my spine.
It's not a satisfying narrative in some ways, and honestly I have no idea how it rates as a game. But on the narrative side I figure that that's the point. I read an article a while back that reminded me about Centralia, the Pennsylvania mining town that was evacuated from 1962 onwards because there's a fire burning underneath it that will burn for a thousand years, and I really felt the parallel: it's a story unfinished because the post-industrial existence it depicts is itself a story unfinished. It's not the kindest choice to the gamer, because you wander off with your head and heart hurting a bit, but the story does end in a beautiful, graceful place, and artistically I think it's a wonder.
Anyway, I have no idea if that will actually persuade anyone to play this game, but I liked it a lot! It's on sale on Steam right now and you can actually play the interludes - little minigames between the acts - for free, including Here And There Along The Echo.