Kentucky Route Zero: The Complete Season Reviews
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.
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 is a brilliantly told story that takes chances, and unapologetically is what it is. Sounds suspiciously like art to me. Damn good art.
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.
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.
Kentucky Route Zero feels breathtakingly original. For something this powerful to exist in any medium would be a triumph. But for it to exist now, as an interactive narrative drawn with striking visuals, meaningful choices, and moving music, feels more like a miracle.
A melancholic magical realism adventure, and a funeral song over the coffin of the American dream.
Review in Russian | Read full review
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.
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 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.
Kentucky Route Zero isn’t a game for everyone, and as a piece of art it is bizarre and gives no clear answers. However, it doesn't have to, and instead allows its characters the room to breathe and push forward its themes in a way that very few games have been able to manage. Kentucky Route Zero has a finale well worth the wait, and a complete package that stands as one of the most interesting video games ever created.
A work of art that I can’t recommend enough.
Kentucky Route Zero is about America in a way few games aspire to be and fewer still succeed at.
I'm not in the unenviable position of giving a score to a game with no generic touchstones or precedence. I can't help but laugh at the absurdity at giving a score to something like Kentucky Route Zero. Did it accomplish everything it intended to do? Almost certainly. Was it "good?" Making a qualitative determination for art almost certainly means you missed the point entirely, doesn't it?
There are few other games like Kentucky Route Zero. The point-and-click/text-based adventure captures the economic anxieties and the loneliness of America in 2020, but it still manages to be hopeful amongst the tragedy. You don't want to miss this.
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.
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.
For it was – it is – unforgettable.
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