Kentucky Route Zero: The Complete Season Reviews
While it took me a while to get into it, I enjoyed my time with Kentucky Route Zero.
Kentucky Route Zero is a game for those who are happy to slowly digest the measured nuances of a text heavy, but visually stunning and thought provoking adventure. Narrative weirdness abounds but it is anchored by a cast of charming and gentle characters who you will grow to love.
Kentucky Route Zero is a brilliantly told story that takes chances, and unapologetically is what it is. Sounds suspiciously like art to me. Damn good art.
Even with a downright cavalcade of triumphs, Kentucky Route Zero's strongest asset is its ability to redefine itself from episode to episode. The deeper your journey goes, the stranger things get, but the more they make sense too. While the game will definitely be a bit too bizarre and densely obtuse for some, this is a game unlike anything you've ever played before.
Kentucky Route Zero is a fascinating story with a thick atmosphere and themes which will leave you thinking longer after playing each act. It's one of the best stories I've ever played or read in a video game, and I implore everyone to play it. Kentucky Route Zero is something special.
Part point-and-click radio play, part adventure game audiobook, Kentucky route Zero is as much of a journey in sound as it is a meditation on surrealism. I'd nominate it for the Booker Prize in literature before I'd hand it a Keighley statue at the Video Game Awards.
Kentucky Route Zero tells a story unlike anything else you'll find in gaming. It uses a point and click adventure format that's pretty basic, but hits high notes with its dialogue, themes, and music.
A work of art that I can’t recommend enough.
Although its moment to moment gameplay might not always hit the mark , the captivating story and colorful cast of characters make Kentucky Route Zero: TV Edition a journey worth taking.
Developped during nearly a decade, the last episode of Kentucky Route Zero has finally arrived, and with it the complete edition of the game. It can almost be considered as an interactive fiction, but with a real attention given to the player and the meaning of its actions throughout the game. As a subjective experience, it also questions the connections between video games and other forms of art.
Review in French | Read full review
Cardboard's work is an incredibly rich, complex, personal experience, but for which it is very easy to feel empathy, since it manages to tell from the popular and human perspective bigger events of each of us. A piece of video game history.
Review in Italian | Read full review
Kentucky Route Zero is about America in a way few games aspire to be and fewer still succeed at.
At the end of a tumultuous decade, it’s only natural to reflect on the years gone by. And here comes a great game to cap the previous decade—and signal the start of something new. If I hadn’t already spent the last several years being told that Kentucky Route Zero was a special game, I’d have known it immediately.
When I stumbled across that grave not 20 minutes into the first act, there were only three surnames listed as “the unfortunate.” Márquez, of course, but two others: “Padilla” and “Nowakowski.” Two names which pierced me on a supernatural, haunting level: one being someone I lost prematurely long ago and the other being close to the name of her dear friend, gone just last year. No one else will experience this or the log scene quite the same way I have. But somewhere in these painterly strokes and grand ambitions hangs tragedy and beauty in equal measure, an experience both wholly unique and painfully universal.
I tried so hard to love this game, but in the end, I only really liked it at best.
A transcendent magic realist adventure, Kentucky Route Zero: TV Edition is a singular experience that rewards perseverance and commitment to its vision.
Kentucky Route Zero: TV Edition from developer Cardboard Computer is still a work of art after all these years. The game is thick in story, choices, and interesting characters that you never want to ignore.
Kentucky Route Zero is a maddeningly obscure visual novel, both beautifully dull and mundanely fascinating. It will no doubt split opinion, but if you enjoy an abundance of metaphor and some quirky introspection, it will definitely tick your boxes.
Kentucky Route Zero is lost in the illusive premise of the American Dream but found in the elusive dream logic of its weird, wild, and wonderful prose. Through it all are characters who conceal pain and loss with whimsical musings of hope and escape and locations engulfed in a meditative haze where brutal reality is indistinguishable from isolated reverie. At the end lies a paradox that suggests a circuitous path was the shortest course to an inevitable destination, and the assurance that Kentucky Route Zero's seven-year voyage knew its direction all along.
Above all, Kentucky Route Zero is an argument that games can be more. That argument isn’t nearly so revolutionary now as it was in 2011 when development began, or 2013 when the first act released. We’ve (thankfully) made some decent progress in the years since. People bought Kentucky Route Zero, and those people did go start their proverbial bands.