Kentucky Route Zero: The Complete Season Reviews

Kentucky Route Zero: The Complete Season is ranked in the 96th percentile of games scored on OpenCritic.
SECTOR.sk
Sector.sk Staff
Top Critic
8 / 10.0
Mar 19, 2013

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

Unscored
Jan 27, 2020

It’s the people, the world, the journey itself that all make this game tick.

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Jan 27, 2020

All considered as the sum of its many, equally magnificent parts, Kentucky Route Zero is a game I won't forget for a long, long time.

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8.5 / 10.0
Jan 27, 2020

Though it seems to be a traditional adventure game at first, this is an enticing and bizarre tale unlike anything you've played before

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Tom Marks
Top Critic
8 / 10.0
Jan 27, 2020

Kentucky Route Zero is a beautiful poetry generator in the body of a point-and-click adventure game.

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9 / 10
Jan 27, 2020

Kentucky Route Zero: TV Edition is the full and complete Kentucky Route Zero experience. A magical realist point-and-click adventure that takes you on a beguiling journey to a place that exists both below and beyond. It's a trip to be savoured, ruminated on; no need to rush.

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Kotaku
Top Critic
Unscored
Jan 27, 2020

Quote not yet available.

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Jan 27, 2020

Kentucky Route Zero is a coffee table book of a game. I don’t feel like you’re really supposed to try and take it all in as a whole. Instead, KRZ, with it’s myriad of references and views, seems like it’s supposed to be taken a piece at a time. Some players are sure to absolutely love that, while others, like me, would prefer something more grounded.

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Daily Dot
Top Critic
Jan 27, 2020

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.

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Unscored
Jan 27, 2020

As the video game industry experienced tumultuous change in the last decade, Kentucky Route Zero has felt like an anomaly, unconcerned with industry trends. Even as an episodic game, developer Cardboard Computer took years at a time to release acts — something most episodic titles try to avoid. It’s like Kentucky Route Zero was rejecting every rule, doing things its own way. Through that, it became one of the most important experimental games ever, establishing itself as a major player in the discourse of whether games are art. Kentucky Route Zero screams an emphatic and stubborn “yes” to that question.

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Eurogamer
Top Critic
Recommended
Jan 28, 2020

Cardboard Computer's elusive adventure game gets a final episode and a console edition, but don't wolf it all down at once.

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6.5 / 10.0
Jan 28, 2020

If you’ve already played the game on PC there is little reason to revisit it unless you absolutely loved it and want to replay it on the go... Sometimes when a game like this takes so long to release the hype around it can be detrimental. On paper this is my kind of game, but it just never got its hooks into me.

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Dave Aubrey
Top Critic
9.5 / 10.0
Jan 30, 2020

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.

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9 / 10
Jan 30, 2020

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.

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Unscored
Jan 30, 2020

For it was – it is – unforgettable.

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95 / 100
Jan 30, 2020

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.

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8 / 10
Jan 31, 2020

An arrestingly surreal triumph that blends point 'n' click and text adventures with a unique style of storytelling and gameplay that was well worth the extremely long wait.

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9.2 / 10.0
Jan 31, 2020

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

Feb 1, 2020

Kentucky Route Zero is about America in a way few games aspire to be and fewer still succeed at.

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Feb 1, 2020

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.

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