Kentucky Route Zero: The Complete Season Reviews
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
While it took me a while to get into it, I enjoyed my time with Kentucky Route Zero.
Those intoxicated by the game's dreamy brew may argue that there are no detours—that, like the Zero, you're either on it or you're not. If you're anything like me and Conway, however, you'll be somewhere in-between.
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.
Kentucky Route Zero is a beautiful poetry generator in the body of a point-and-click adventure game.
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.
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
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.
Though it seems to be a traditional adventure game at first, this is an enticing and bizarre tale unlike anything you've played before
A compelling story about rural America that is both surreal and thoughtful, if a little disorienting.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 masterful piece of interactive storytelling. Mysterious, mercurial, and exquisitely beautiful.
Kentucky Route Zero is a game that I'm still thinking about days after reaching its conclusion. Though it's slow (maybe too slow for some) and introspective, it's also an exceptionally engaging interactive experience. If you are into the slow burn kind of story then this is definitely for you, but if you're not then you may bounce off of the Zero.
After seven years, Kentucky Route Zero reaches the end of the road, and the full portrait it paints is melancholy and sorrowful but also absolutely beautiful.
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
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