Stories about road trips are never really about the journey. They’re about the places the trip goes, the people who live there, and how they change the passengers along the way. What may be the greatest road trip game ever made is celebrating its fifth anniversary, and it feels just as relevant today as it did when it was released on January 28, 2020.
I should actually say finished, not released. The point-and-click adventure game Kentucky Route Zero tells its story in five episodes released at an astonishingly leisurely pace (the pace all good road trips take). Episode 1 arrived in 2013, the second episode came quickly after the first, and then the gaps between them grew longer until players waited more than three years for the final installment. Kentucky Route Zero is now available in one collected edition you could rush through in a week, but it’s a game that deserves to be savored slowly.
Surreal spaces and strange characters abound in Kentucky Route Zero.
Kentucky Route Zero stars a delivery driver named Conway determined to drop a package off at an address he can’t find. As the game opens, Conway is directed to the Zero, an ethereal highway that connects forgotten places and people, and will somehow lead Conway to the elusive 5 Dogwood Drive.
It’s not much to build a game on, but the scope of Kentucky Route Zero quickly expands. Before heading to the Zero, Conway picks up a travel companion named Shannon, a woman with a connection to his goal and a journey of her own. Once they reach the Zero, the pair travel through a surreal underworld version of Kentucky, home to an underground river, dream-logic state agencies, and a bizarre cast of characters that seem to exist partway between this world and another.
Kentucky Route Zero has endless variety to explore along its underground highway.
A story that doesn’t hang together logically is often a failure; we generally like stories that follow the same pattern of coherent causality that we use to parse the real world. But Kentucky Route Zero, inspired as it is by magical realist fiction, does away with any notion of traditional point-A-to-point-B plotting to get closer to the feelings and ideas it’s concerned with.
And it’s concerned with a lot. Sometimes it’s on the nose, like a subplot about an entire community being in debt to the local electric company. Other times, the meaning of Conway’s encounters are more opaque, like his run-in with a giant bird that moves entire houses from place to place.
Just as it jumps from subject to subject, Kentucky Route Zero veers around wildly in terms of style, sometimes presenting you a game close to a sidescrolling adventure, and sometimes using a single camera angle to capture an entire scene. Its world is often dim and shadowy, but even the way it expresses darkness and light change depending on the story’s immediate needs.
Kentucky Route Zero is ultimately a game about a community in crisis.
One thing remains constant — Kentucky Route Zero is a game about people. For all the surreal majesty of its many setpieces, the heart of its story lies in the ghostlike residents of the Zero and its environs. Orphans and vagabonds abound, people left unhoused and unmoored by capital that rearranges even these quasi-magical spaces to fit its own needs, crushing anyone and anything that doesn’t serve its goals. Many of the game’s characters are artists, suggesting that art can and must survive under the most brutal conditions. It can’t fix the world, but it can offer escape and solace.
Kentucky Route Zero took its place in the video game canon thanks to its fantastic writing and beguiling story, but it also accidentally stands as perhaps the biggest success of the episodic release model. Waiting seven years for Kentucky Route Zero to finish was excruciating, but it also turned the game into a journey as meandering and unclear as Conway’s. The best way to engage with Kentucky Route Zero is to take it slow, giving each episode and the intermissions between them a chance to take root in your mind.
In the five years since its finale, Kentucky Route Zero has earned its place as one of the best games of the past decade, and one with a clear influence on many narratives that followed it. You probably shouldn’t wait years between each installment, but its destination only feels more powerful if you take your time reaching it.
