Game of the Month #61 (February 2020) - Kentucky Route Zero

Kentucky Route Zero is a magical realist adventure game about a secret highway in the caves beneath Kentucky, and the mysterious folks who travel it.

If this game part of a bigger series or just a standalone / beginning?

If this game part of a bigger series or just a standalone / beginning?

Looks like an episodic game like telltale games. I don't think there is any plans for sequel or somert

If this game part of a bigger series or just a standalone / beginning?

Like knalb said, it's an episodic adventure game that just released its fifth final episode a couple of days ago. In terms of gameplay I'd say it has more in common with Oxenfree and to a certain extent Night in the Woods (both of which cite KRZ as an influence) since your choices don't really change the plot, but they do affect your relationships and the general atmosphere/tone.

I know it's an oddball indie game, but I hope folks will give it a shot. I'm planning to pace out my episode completions throughout the month so I'm not dumping it all the beginning or end. I'll do a write-up after I finish each episode to hopefully generate some discussion.

Thanks for the replies. I could have googled it but I imagine it's the kind of game you don't want to spoil if it's narrative focused. Knowing that it's its own thing I might just give it a shot :)

I would also support not spoiling too much of this game. I've played all but the last episode, but seeing as the last update came out years ago, I plan to go through the entire game again, as it's worth sinking into each part to really soak up what's going on.

I'm always into surrealism and abstract narratives, but I know not everyone is so all I want to say is that if it seems too weird for anyone, just stick with it and see where it goes. The gameplay is varied and the story is intriguing, plus it's not very long so it's worth seeing through to the end =)

I'm so happy this one won! I started watching a Let's Play of Act I when that first released but stopped once I decided that I'd rather play it for myself. I got it in a Humble Monthly a while back, and I've just been waiting for Act V to release to finally play it. I'm planning on binging the entire experience in one go, but I'll pace out any impressions I have as the month goes on like Kerf is doing.

Also if anyone's interested in a physical copy of this, iam8bit has preorders up for Switch and PS4 copies, and a vinyl of the soundtrack: https://www.iam8bit.com/collections/krz

Ahem, Kentucky Route Zero's an interesting game :)

Decided to salvage the more positive comments from a cached version from google. Most of page 2 doesn't appear to have been cached unfortunately, but the opinions of those who put the effort in and got a lot out of it deserve to be preserved. Abatage said a lot too but mostly to counter the negative feedback.

Originally Posted by: Tasita

A magical realism game! I always thought that Magical Realism was an excellent genre for video games, sadly not many people have tried to do something there.
For those who want to know, magical realism is a literature genre born in latin america, that it's somewhere in the middle. It's not real, but it isn't full fantasy neither. They tend to ve somewhat political books, understandbly, since the 20 century in Latin America was a very unstable time, with the Plan Condor and the military coups that came with it.
Most works on this genre took some of the classics fantasy tropes (Like curses, the undead, strange races/species, vampires, weird bend of time and space, etc) and put them to work on a more realist enviroment, and people in the story tend to look at these magical events as normal, for example, not batting an eye when a phantom appears out of nowhere. Due to this, most texts have a dreamlike or somewhat surreal sensation to them, without getting into full surrealism.
Two of the most known writers on the genre are Julio Cortazar and Miguel Garcia Marquez.
Marquez wrote "One hundred years of solitude", his most famous novel that got him a nobel prize in literature, and my favourite book. This novel tell the story of a family, their curse, and the town where they inhabit, in a fantasy latin american town called Macondo, so, there is a beautiful homage on the game, where the Marquez farm is in Macondo street.

I leave a translation of a passage of "One hundred years of solitude" that I found on the tvtropes page for magic realism:

"It was as if God had decided to put to the test every capacity for surprise... to such an extreme that no-one knew for certain where the limits of reality lay. It was an intricate stew of truths and mirages that convulsed the ghost of José Arcadio Buendía with impatience and made him wander all through the house even in broad daylight."

Originally Posted by: KerfMerf

Wrapped up my playthrough of Act I last night! Since this is a game more about atmosphere than plot, I'm gonna leap right in without spoiler tags, but if something truly feels "spoilery" then I'll try to be cognizant about it.

What stands out to me immediately is the utter ghostliness of everything. From the underground D&D group to the mathematician to the miners, ghosts are very prevalent. And yet, there doesn't appear to be a great sense of loss. There's a great emptiness, but there's always something rushing to fill in that emptiness. Take the map: it's just a big black slate with white lines marking roads that at first appear empty, but when you start taking backroads and exploring, you'll come across camps, churches, museums, and swarms of dragonflies. You often don't even realize they're there until you're right on top of them. Despite only being one episode in, I have a feeling this interplay between the ephemeral and the eternal is going to be a major theme.

There's Conway himself, who delivers antiques--permanent artifacts left over from a lost time. There's Shannon, whose business is repairing TVs that no one owns anymore. There's Carrington, who wants to put on an experimental one-man play in the middle of nowhere. They all have different relations with time, space, what is temporary, and what is lasting. I can't really speculate until I play more how those relationships will come to affect them, but they're all searching for spaces where their purpose can be made clear (the delivery location for Conway, a performance venue for Carrington).

From a less analytical standpoint, I'm loving the overall aesthetic and style of dialogue. It may seem like a lot of dead-end conversations about nothing, but every word is saturated with character. It's a nice break from games where every line is just advancing the plot. I don't know yet how much my "choices" will affect the outcomes--very little I expect--but the dialogue trees really just seem like a low-stakes means for developing your version of these characters without the pressure of hidden relationship values telling you "So-and-so disliked that" (I love Telltale games too, but I'm happy to see a different approach). Is Conway the kind of person who responds to all questions about his career choice, "It's better than being in a ditch"? For me, yeah. Anyway, I'll keep updating my progress as I go. Hope to hear about the progress others are making!

Finally got around to playing the first interlude, "Limits and Demonstrations" and Act II. I'll be honest, I thought about just not bothering to post my thoughts anymore since the thread took such a negative spiral with no one else even attempting to engage with me, but abatage coming to the game's defense gave me just enough reinvigoration to keep going.

I want to address a few criticisms before I move into some of my observations. Everyone is of course entitled to their opinions, but I'm not sure the game has been given an entirely fair shake. For one, I think perhaps too much stake has been placed in thinking of KRZ as a "game." I mean, yes, it is, it's defined as such, but its goals are not the same goals as other types of interactive storytelling. I think it's better to think of it almost like loosely structured improvisational theater, a la commedia dell'arte. The game wears its theatricality on its sleeve, most obviously in the act and scene structuring, but also in its very presentation, since every area is a side-on tableau as if it's being viewed on a stage. You are presented with a cast of characters that are only defined in the loosest terms, and how they act from there on out is dependent on you as a director of sorts--but the scenario itself (like with commedia dell'arte) is fixed. The choices will not change the events, but they do change the characterization, the sense of humor, the sense of connect or disconnect.

This is not something we're really "trained" to expect from video games. We expect our decisions to change the world, because in other games, our decisions do change the world. But the stakes here are not life and death, they are about communication, selfishness, pride, deflection, and all the personal risks we take when interacting with other people. Act II, for example, begins with some choices I found brilliant: a character has received a rejection for an architecture portfolio. Does she throw away the letter and set to rejecting all of the proposals on her desk out of petty spite? Does she quietly put the letter away and accept all the proposals out of a kind of solidarity? Does she stonewall her old friend asking for a favor or try to empathize? I can understand not immediately grasping what the designers were going for by presenting choices like this, but the choices are not random or meaningless. You do have to give yourself over to the experiment, though, and determine what kind of tone you want to create through the dialogue trees, how you want to develop the characters in your own way. If you write off the experiment from the start and don't choose based on a consistent internal logic, I can see how the result can be messy and feel like the characters are all blending together. Maybe their intentions could have been signaled better, but that's difficult without losing subtlety and the sense of discovery.

Updating from my previous post, I'm starting to become even more positive that a big thematic crux is the changing of space in the search for something definite. The Bureau of Reclaimed Spaces repossesses unused buildings and grants them to new groups (sometimes recursively: there's a line I don't remember word for word about how a chapel that had been converted into a showroom can be repurposed into a chapel). Even the Bureau itself moved into an old Church, and the Church moved into the Bureau's old building with no clear reason on either side--a true hallmark of literary absurdism. This Act also has the Museum of Dwellings, which is just a big collection of houses and houselike objects that ordinary people have moved into. No space is ever what it seems at first glance, which seems to me a metaphor for Conway trying to navigate a changing world. He's an old guy who doesn't fit in. His injury makes it so that he can barely even move around when he's on solid ground. Often, Shannon has to do things for him while he can only sit back and wait. He takes it all in stride with a deferential attitude, but why? Partly, it's because of the magical realism, nothing is treated as abnormal, but it's never that simple. Is he avoiding making this delivery, since it's the final one and he's not ready to become an antique himself, much like what he delivers? I haven't quite made up my mind on that yet, but I am still finding a lot of pleasure in the aesthetics.

There's also something to all the TVs--they're prominent enough to be a symbol in their own way. I'm reminded of Haruki Murakami's story, "TV People," which is all a big metaphor for the social and cultural paradigm shift of having screen entertainment always available, and how that can be an obsessing and hypnotizing thing. I don't think that's what's going on here, but I think it is notable that Shannon repairs TVs, specifically old ones. And, well, Conway himself is kind of an old TV in a way, so maybe it's a bit on the nose, but it seems that in some way she's going to repair whatever is broken in him.

Decided to salvage the more positive comments from a cached version from google. Most of page 2 doesn't appear to have been cached unfortunately, but the opinions of those who put the effort in and got a lot out of it deserve to be preserved. Abatage said a lot too but mostly to counter the negative feedback.

Originally Posted by: Tasita

A magical realism game! I always thought that Magical Realism was an excellent genre for video games, sadly not many people have tried to do something there.
For those who want to know, magical realism is a literature genre born in latin america, that it's somewhere in the middle. It's not real, but it isn't full fantasy neither. They tend to ve somewhat political books, understandbly, since the 20 century in Latin America was a very unstable time, with the Plan Condor and the military coups that came with it.
Most works on this genre took some of the classics fantasy tropes (Like curses, the undead, strange races/species, vampires, weird bend of time and space, etc) and put them to work on a more realist enviroment, and people in the story tend to look at these magical events as normal, for example, not batting an eye when a phantom appears out of nowhere. Due to this, most texts have a dreamlike or somewhat surreal sensation to them, without getting into full surrealism.
Two of the most known writers on the genre are Julio Cortazar and Miguel Garcia Marquez.
Marquez wrote "One hundred years of solitude", his most famous novel that got him a nobel prize in literature, and my favourite book. This novel tell the story of a family, their curse, and the town where they inhabit, in a fantasy latin american town called Macondo, so, there is a beautiful homage on the game, where the Marquez farm is in Macondo street.

I leave a translation of a passage of "One hundred years of solitude" that I found on the tvtropes page for magic realism:

"It was as if God had decided to put to the test every capacity for surprise... to such an extreme that no-one knew for certain where the limits of reality lay. It was an intricate stew of truths and mirages that convulsed the ghost of José Arcadio Buendía with impatience and made him wander all through the house even in broad daylight."

Originally Posted by: KerfMerf

Wrapped up my playthrough of Act I last night! Since this is a game more about atmosphere than plot, I'm gonna leap right in without spoiler tags, but if something truly feels "spoilery" then I'll try to be cognizant about it.

What stands out to me immediately is the utter ghostliness of everything. From the underground D&D group to the mathematician to the miners, ghosts are very prevalent. And yet, there doesn't appear to be a great sense of loss. There's a great emptiness, but there's always something rushing to fill in that emptiness. Take the map: it's just a big black slate with white lines marking roads that at first appear empty, but when you start taking backroads and exploring, you'll come across camps, churches, museums, and swarms of dragonflies. You often don't even realize they're there until you're right on top of them. Despite only being one episode in, I have a feeling this interplay between the ephemeral and the eternal is going to be a major theme.

There's Conway himself, who delivers antiques--permanent artifacts left over from a lost time. There's Shannon, whose business is repairing TVs that no one owns anymore. There's Carrington, who wants to put on an experimental one-man play in the middle of nowhere. They all have different relations with time, space, what is temporary, and what is lasting. I can't really speculate until I play more how those relationships will come to affect them, but they're all searching for spaces where their purpose can be made clear (the delivery location for Conway, a performance venue for Carrington).

From a less analytical standpoint, I'm loving the overall aesthetic and style of dialogue. It may seem like a lot of dead-end conversations about nothing, but every word is saturated with character. It's a nice break from games where every line is just advancing the plot. I don't know yet how much my "choices" will affect the outcomes--very little I expect--but the dialogue trees really just seem like a low-stakes means for developing your version of these characters without the pressure of hidden relationship values telling you "So-and-so disliked that" (I love Telltale games too, but I'm happy to see a different approach). Is Conway the kind of person who responds to all questions about his career choice, "It's better than being in a ditch"? For me, yeah. Anyway, I'll keep updating my progress as I go. Hope to hear about the progress others are making!

Finally got around to playing the first interlude, "Limits and Demonstrations" and Act II. I'll be honest, I thought about just not bothering to post my thoughts anymore since the thread took such a negative spiral with no one else even attempting to engage with me, but abatage coming to the game's defense gave me just enough reinvigoration to keep going.

I want to address a few criticisms before I move into some of my observations. Everyone is of course entitled to their opinions, but I'm not sure the game has been given an entirely fair shake. For one, I think perhaps too much stake has been placed in thinking of KRZ as a "game." I mean, yes, it is, it's defined as such, but its goals are not the same goals as other types of interactive storytelling. I think it's better to think of it almost like loosely structured improvisational theater, a la commedia dell'arte. The game wears its theatricality on its sleeve, most obviously in the act and scene structuring, but also in its very presentation, since every area is a side-on tableau as if it's being viewed on a stage. You are presented with a cast of characters that are only defined in the loosest terms, and how they act from there on out is dependent on you as a director of sorts--but the scenario itself (like with commedia dell'arte) is fixed. The choices will not change the events, but they do change the characterization, the sense of humor, the sense of connect or disconnect.

This is not something we're really "trained" to expect from video games. We expect our decisions to change the world, because in other games, our decisions do change the world. But the stakes here are not life and death, they are about communication, selfishness, pride, deflection, and all the personal risks we take when interacting with other people. Act II, for example, begins with some choices I found brilliant: a character has received a rejection for an architecture portfolio. Does she throw away the letter and set to rejecting all of the proposals on her desk out of petty spite? Does she quietly put the letter away and accept all the proposals out of a kind of solidarity? Does she stonewall her old friend asking for a favor or try to empathize? I can understand not immediately grasping what the designers were going for by presenting choices like this, but the choices are not random or meaningless. You do have to give yourself over to the experiment, though, and determine what kind of tone you want to create through the dialogue trees, how you want to develop the characters in your own way. If you write off the experiment from the start and don't choose based on a consistent internal logic, I can see how the result can be messy and feel like the characters are all blending together. Maybe their intentions could have been signaled better, but that's difficult without losing subtlety and the sense of discovery.

Updating from my previous post, I'm starting to become even more positive that a big thematic crux is the changing of space in the search for something definite. The Bureau of Reclaimed Spaces repossesses unused buildings and grants them to new groups (sometimes recursively: there's a line I don't remember word for word about how a chapel that had been converted into a showroom can be repurposed into a chapel). Even the Bureau itself moved into an old Church, and the Church moved into the Bureau's old building with no clear reason on either side--a true hallmark of literary absurdism. This Act also has the Museum of Dwellings, which is just a big collection of houses and houselike objects that ordinary people have moved into. No space is ever what it seems at first glance, which seems to me a metaphor for Conway trying to navigate a changing world. He's an old guy who doesn't fit in. His injury makes it so that he can barely even move around when he's on solid ground. Often, Shannon has to do things for him while he can only sit back and wait. He takes it all in stride with a deferential attitude, but why? Partly, it's because of the magical realism, nothing is treated as abnormal, but it's never that simple. Is he avoiding making this delivery, since it's the final one and he's not ready to become an antique himself, much like what he delivers? I haven't quite made up my mind on that yet, but I am still finding a lot of pleasure in the aesthetics.

There's also something to all the TVs--they're prominent enough to be a symbol in their own way. I'm reminded of Haruki Murakami's story, "TV People," which is all a big metaphor for the social and cultural paradigm shift of having screen entertainment always available, and how that can be an obsessing and hypnotizing thing. I don't think that's what's going on here, but I think it is notable that Shannon repairs TVs, specifically old ones. And, well, Conway himself is kind of an old TV in a way, so maybe it's a bit on the nose, but it seems that in some way she's going to repair whatever is broken in him.

Awesome! Thank you!

Decided to salvage the more positive comments from a cached version from google. Most of page 2 doesn't appear to have been cached unfortunately, but the opinions of those who put the effort in and got a lot out of it deserve to be preserved. Abatage said a lot too but mostly to counter the negative feedback.

Originally Posted by: Tasita

A magical realism game! I always thought that Magical Realism was an excellent genre for video games, sadly not many people have tried to do something there.
For those who want to know, magical realism is a literature genre born in latin america, that it's somewhere in the middle. It's not real, but it isn't full fantasy neither. They tend to ve somewhat political books, understandbly, since the 20 century in Latin America was a very unstable time, with the Plan Condor and the military coups that came with it.
Most works on this genre took some of the classics fantasy tropes (Like curses, the undead, strange races/species, vampires, weird bend of time and space, etc) and put them to work on a more realist enviroment, and people in the story tend to look at these magical events as normal, for example, not batting an eye when a phantom appears out of nowhere. Due to this, most texts have a dreamlike or somewhat surreal sensation to them, without getting into full surrealism.
Two of the most known writers on the genre are Julio Cortazar and Miguel Garcia Marquez.
Marquez wrote "One hundred years of solitude", his most famous novel that got him a nobel prize in literature, and my favourite book. This novel tell the story of a family, their curse, and the town where they inhabit, in a fantasy latin american town called Macondo, so, there is a beautiful homage on the game, where the Marquez farm is in Macondo street.

I leave a translation of a passage of "One hundred years of solitude" that I found on the tvtropes page for magic realism:

"It was as if God had decided to put to the test every capacity for surprise... to such an extreme that no-one knew for certain where the limits of reality lay. It was an intricate stew of truths and mirages that convulsed the ghost of José Arcadio Buendía with impatience and made him wander all through the house even in broad daylight."

Originally Posted by: KerfMerf

Wrapped up my playthrough of Act I last night! Since this is a game more about atmosphere than plot, I'm gonna leap right in without spoiler tags, but if something truly feels "spoilery" then I'll try to be cognizant about it.

What stands out to me immediately is the utter ghostliness of everything. From the underground D&D group to the mathematician to the miners, ghosts are very prevalent. And yet, there doesn't appear to be a great sense of loss. There's a great emptiness, but there's always something rushing to fill in that emptiness. Take the map: it's just a big black slate with white lines marking roads that at first appear empty, but when you start taking backroads and exploring, you'll come across camps, churches, museums, and swarms of dragonflies. You often don't even realize they're there until you're right on top of them. Despite only being one episode in, I have a feeling this interplay between the ephemeral and the eternal is going to be a major theme.

There's Conway himself, who delivers antiques--permanent artifacts left over from a lost time. There's Shannon, whose business is repairing TVs that no one owns anymore. There's Carrington, who wants to put on an experimental one-man play in the middle of nowhere. They all have different relations with time, space, what is temporary, and what is lasting. I can't really speculate until I play more how those relationships will come to affect them, but they're all searching for spaces where their purpose can be made clear (the delivery location for Conway, a performance venue for Carrington).

From a less analytical standpoint, I'm loving the overall aesthetic and style of dialogue. It may seem like a lot of dead-end conversations about nothing, but every word is saturated with character. It's a nice break from games where every line is just advancing the plot. I don't know yet how much my "choices" will affect the outcomes--very little I expect--but the dialogue trees really just seem like a low-stakes means for developing your version of these characters without the pressure of hidden relationship values telling you "So-and-so disliked that" (I love Telltale games too, but I'm happy to see a different approach). Is Conway the kind of person who responds to all questions about his career choice, "It's better than being in a ditch"? For me, yeah. Anyway, I'll keep updating my progress as I go. Hope to hear about the progress others are making!

Finally got around to playing the first interlude, "Limits and Demonstrations" and Act II. I'll be honest, I thought about just not bothering to post my thoughts anymore since the thread took such a negative spiral with no one else even attempting to engage with me, but abatage coming to the game's defense gave me just enough reinvigoration to keep going.

I want to address a few criticisms before I move into some of my observations. Everyone is of course entitled to their opinions, but I'm not sure the game has been given an entirely fair shake. For one, I think perhaps too much stake has been placed in thinking of KRZ as a "game." I mean, yes, it is, it's defined as such, but its goals are not the same goals as other types of interactive storytelling. I think it's better to think of it almost like loosely structured improvisational theater, a la commedia dell'arte. The game wears its theatricality on its sleeve, most obviously in the act and scene structuring, but also in its very presentation, since every area is a side-on tableau as if it's being viewed on a stage. You are presented with a cast of characters that are only defined in the loosest terms, and how they act from there on out is dependent on you as a director of sorts--but the scenario itself (like with commedia dell'arte) is fixed. The choices will not change the events, but they do change the characterization, the sense of humor, the sense of connect or disconnect.

This is not something we're really "trained" to expect from video games. We expect our decisions to change the world, because in other games, our decisions do change the world. But the stakes here are not life and death, they are about communication, selfishness, pride, deflection, and all the personal risks we take when interacting with other people. Act II, for example, begins with some choices I found brilliant: a character has received a rejection for an architecture portfolio. Does she throw away the letter and set to rejecting all of the proposals on her desk out of petty spite? Does she quietly put the letter away and accept all the proposals out of a kind of solidarity? Does she stonewall her old friend asking for a favor or try to empathize? I can understand not immediately grasping what the designers were going for by presenting choices like this, but the choices are not random or meaningless. You do have to give yourself over to the experiment, though, and determine what kind of tone you want to create through the dialogue trees, how you want to develop the characters in your own way. If you write off the experiment from the start and don't choose based on a consistent internal logic, I can see how the result can be messy and feel like the characters are all blending together. Maybe their intentions could have been signaled better, but that's difficult without losing subtlety and the sense of discovery.

Updating from my previous post, I'm starting to become even more positive that a big thematic crux is the changing of space in the search for something definite. The Bureau of Reclaimed Spaces repossesses unused buildings and grants them to new groups (sometimes recursively: there's a line I don't remember word for word about how a chapel that had been converted into a showroom can be repurposed into a chapel). Even the Bureau itself moved into an old Church, and the Church moved into the Bureau's old building with no clear reason on either side--a true hallmark of literary absurdism. This Act also has the Museum of Dwellings, which is just a big collection of houses and houselike objects that ordinary people have moved into. No space is ever what it seems at first glance, which seems to me a metaphor for Conway trying to navigate a changing world. He's an old guy who doesn't fit in. His injury makes it so that he can barely even move around when he's on solid ground. Often, Shannon has to do things for him while he can only sit back and wait. He takes it all in stride with a deferential attitude, but why? Partly, it's because of the magical realism, nothing is treated as abnormal, but it's never that simple. Is he avoiding making this delivery, since it's the final one and he's not ready to become an antique himself, much like what he delivers? I haven't quite made up my mind on that yet, but I am still finding a lot of pleasure in the aesthetics.

There's also something to all the TVs--they're prominent enough to be a symbol in their own way. I'm reminded of Haruki Murakami's story, "TV People," which is all a big metaphor for the social and cultural paradigm shift of having screen entertainment always available, and how that can be an obsessing and hypnotizing thing. I don't think that's what's going on here, but I think it is notable that Shannon repairs TVs, specifically old ones. And, well, Conway himself is kind of an old TV in a way, so maybe it's a bit on the nose, but it seems that in some way she's going to repair whatever is broken in him.

yeah I don't think anything I said needs saving as it was mostly in response to other things that were lost =)

glad to have some other perspectives back though

yeah I don't think anything I said needs saving as it was mostly in response to other things that were lost =)

glad to have some other perspectives back though

I disagree, a lot of what you said was worth keeping, and I wholly support it if someone wants to quote in other posts. I figured it would be best if the reset was used to reflect the better part of the discussion from what was cached and not the back and forth tit for tat. Consider it the "route" not taken.

Besides you said you were gonna make a post about your own thoughts on it eventually *nudge nudge* :)

I disagree, a lot of what you said was worth keeping, and I wholly support it if someone wants to quote in other posts. I figured it would be best if the reset was used to reflect the better part of the discussion from what was cached and not the back and forth tit for tat. Consider it the "route" not taken.

Besides you said you were gonna make a post about your own thoughts on it eventually *nudge nudge* :)

I still plan to - just haven't finished the game yet lol
and I'm trying to actually finish games at the moment to get my "playing" list down, so hopefully I'll have it done soon =)