Kentucky Route Zero: The Complete Season Reviews
More than being a video game, Kentucky Route Zero is a work of art
A decade after the debut of its first act, Kentucky Route Zero TV Edition still offers a compelling, verbose experience in its original magical realist universe.
Kentucky Route Zero: TV Edition for the Xbox Series X|S is a bit of a strange beast. The narrative is engaging as it meanders to an end goal, but the journey from A to B is pretty abstract.
There is no wrong decision in Kentucky Route Zero. Either you get off the highway, for which you get an unconventional storytelling without a traditional form of interaction, or you're going to sming around it and reach for something that's not challenging. Simple.
Review in Slovak | Read full review
All in all, Kentucky Route Zero is an amazing indie, a game that isn't for everyone because of the number of lines of text displayed on screen and in some ways a title very different from anything else we've played in recent years. Its narrative of sometimes somewhat complex but the immersion it achieves on the part of the player in the 10 or 12 hours it takes to complete it is total. It is certainly a highly recommended experience for those looking for an introspective adventure that makes them reflect.
Review in Spanish | Read full review
A melancholic magical realism adventure, and a funeral song over the coffin of the American dream.
Review in Russian | Read full review
Kentucky Route Zero is an incredibly dull and over-embellished text adventure that fails to engage, entertain, or provide much value to anyone but perhaps the uppermost art connoisseurs.
Those looking for a challenge or something a bit more action packed won’t find what they’re looking for here, but those looking for a surreal and mysterious tale will have come to the right place.
Kentucky Route Zero: TV Edition is a story-heavy game that not everyone will appreciate but those who do will love it a lot.
Kentucky Route Zero TV Edition is like a Michelin meal — rich, decadent, experimental, yet still somehow recognizable but best enjoyed in small portions. I can easily see how the critically-acclaimed Kentucky Route Zero could become someone’s favorite game, so it stands to reason that Kentucky Route Zero TV Edition would be another success after the episodic original’s completion. Although I suspect Kentucky Route Zero is best experienced on the PC, Kentucky Route Zero TV Edition is still a must-play even if you’ve already enjoyed the original. And if you haven’t yet played this digital masterpiece, well… consider getting lost in Kentucky Route Zero TV Edition.
A surreal and emotional journey through the heartland of the United States, amidst highways and ghosts.
Review in Portuguese | Read full review
Kentucky Route Zero is a fantastic story that took 7 years to tell, 12 hours to play, and will forever be one of my favorite point-and-click adventure games for a long while. It's rare for a game like this to captivate players with its deep characters, and excellent presentation and it does so brilliantly.
I gladly remember Kentucky Route Zero for its dense atmosphere, great soundtrack and beautiful places - even if I sometimes asked myself what I'm doing in this surreal world.
Review in German | Read full review
If going on a surreal ‘road to nowhere’ journey is your thing, Kentucky Route Zero: TV Edition may well be right up your street. If you want to play games that respect your gaming time this is probably not for you. This game has a lot going for it but at the same time contains many things that diminish its playability. Being available on Game Pass does, however, make playing it more of a tempting proposition than actually having to pay for it.
Kentucky Route Zero is a graphic adventure suitable for those players who are able to appreciate titles in which you read a lot and play little, in the strict sense of the term.
Review in Italian | Read full review
Because it is rather obtuse at times, I can’t wholeheartedly recommend it to everyone, but if you’re anything like me and you love carefully-constructed, paradoxical art that is enlightening and entertaining, haunting and hopeful, melancholy and magical, perceptive and pointed, you might really fall in love with the existential irreverence of Kentucky Route Zero.
Kentucky Route Zero tells fascinating tales about its world and the people who inhabit it, but fails to connect its many threads into a cohesive whole.
Characters come and go, the underlying significance of their very existence seemingly shifting between acts, no doubt a consequence of the years it took to finish these acts; people change over time, and as Kentucky Route Zero limps—sometimes literally—toward a half-hearted and barely coherent conclusion that’s more of a misery-flavored Rorschach test than an understandable sequence of events driven by people worth caring about, the storylines that start to splay every which way suggest that the developers kept changing their minds about the game’s underlying meaning. Or maybe it simply shifted out from under them. Either way, Kentucky Route Zero is a game that’s ultimately meaningless, a meandering mess of pretentious nonsense that wields its (arguably undeserved) “art” status as a shield in order to protect itself from the pointlessness of the journey and the blandness of those journeying.
Kentucky Route Zero is a work of art that rests solely on its literary qualities and atmosphere. Good thing is that both of these aspects are very solid and the long wait for the final act was worth it. A worthy conclusion of a remarkable video game.
Review in Slovak | Read full review
With its sombre mood, innovative narrative design, and deeply poetic writing, Kentucky Route Zero is one of the most unique and important games ever made.