![]() Its structure-the way the acts and interludes are built-is inspired by theatrical set design, particularly where you are drawn into spaces where the audience is, say, both inside and outside of a bisected house, where the walls open up and dissolve the lines. Where many videogames look primarily to other games for inspiration, Kentucky Route Zero reaches outside the medium, referencing film, theater, poetry, philosophy, semiotics, bluegrass music, computer art, and interactive fiction. Like 40 percent of Americans, Conway and the people he meets-a TV repairwoman, two self-liberated androids, a professional theremin player, and a little boy whose brother is a giant eagle-are all teetering on the edge of financial ruin, just one accident or bad day away from toppling over into crushing debt. ![]() Everyone you meet in its version of rural Kentucky feels lost, liminal, and precarious. Originally conceived in the aftermath of the devastating 2008 recession, Kentucky Route Zero is a surreal tour of economic ruin visited on the Rust Belt by the greed of the superrich. Imagine it is a tragic ghost story about the American Dream where the ghost is the American Dream the tragedy is that it keeps haunting America because it doesn’t know it’s dead. Imagine for a moment that the next Great American Novel was created in the 21st century as a point-and-click adventure game, woven out of Southern Gothic fiction, magical realism, and a techno-mystical understanding of hyperreality. Kentucky Route Zero has never been a very literal game, which makes it hard to describe in concrete terms, but let’s give it a try. Naturally, the fifth act ends with something that feels like a beginning: a hazy orange sunrise, shimmering across a waterlogged town the morning after a terrible storm. ![]() Back in 2013, the first chapter began with a scene that felt very much like an epilogue: an aging man named Conway setting out at sunset to make his last delivery for a doomed antique store. This is a game that loves circles, cycles, places where binaries collapse: real and unreal, absence and presence, inside and outside. The menu takes the shape of a circle, each act arranged around it like numbers on a clock face. It’s finally here, part of a new collected edition from Annapurna Interactive for PC and console. Over the past seven years, the three-person indie studio Cardboard Computer has released four episodic “acts” of its critically acclaimed game, along with four playable “interludes.” Fans have eagerly awaited the fifth and final chapter, the one where maybe, just maybe, you will arrive at your destination. Kentucky Route Zero has won “Game of the Year” awards multiple times, was dubbed the “best musical of 2014,” and has been called “the most important game of the decade”-and all this before it was finished.
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