Kentucky Route Zero: PC Edition Reviews

I don't know how many types of sadness there are, but here's KRZ inventing all new ones anyway.

What I liked: attractive, spare animation; smart writing about big topics (class, wage slavery, environment); outstanding music. What I didn't like: it felt like my choices had no effect on the story, and I didn't feel connected with the characters. Perhaps rolling out the phases of the game over many years meant that the designers changed their mind over time about some things, but yeah, there were some choices that didn't make sense to me (like Conway's arc). I didn't finish Act V because I lost interest.

Kentucky Route Zero is an intensely slow appalachian/southern gothic narrative with point and click elements. The visuals are pleasantly minimalist, and the sound design and music are strong and effective; however the narrative is the game's strongest feature. Despite the narrative being its strongest asset, it is at the same time loose and slow, and the early acts are impenetrable due in part to its surrealist qualities. It picks up and develops in the later acts when the threads begin to form a tapestry, but it does feel as though it could have been tightened up. The slow pace is deliberate and does add value to the themes presented, but can be on the frustrating side before it begins to coalesce. Kentucky Route Zero is not for everyone. The gameplay is thin and the narrative is fairly sluggish early on, but there is true value in its narrative and it presents a unique look into southern gothic themes, enhanced with a surrealist lens. I would recommend Kentucky Route Zero to the right audience, much like a book by William Faulkner.

I was literally forcing myself to finish this unlit I've realized his is not a game, it's an experience. If you treat it this way you might have some fun with it

This is barely a game. It is a mad lib post modernist story with game like elements. I put in a few hours and decided to drop it after the story ended up with an absurd plot point. To be clear the only game play is clicking around and advancing text bubbles. It is not clear what any of the multiple choice dialogue leads to and a vast majority of the content just tries to be weird/off putting.

I had an overall positive experience with this game, but there were major issues with it that are hard to overlook. The vibe was solid, the main underlying story was interesting, and the music was folksy and contemplative. However, both in narrative and mechanics, I felt that this game fell short of the mark it was shooting for. Mechanically, the game is almost entirely linear and the choices presented to the player seem to have no meaningful impact on the direction of the game at all. There are multiple dialogue options for nearly every interaction in the game but they don't seem to affect anything, leaving me feeling like I was being dragged along with enough of an illusion of choice that it felt interactive when it really wasn't. Maybe this was an attempt at making a point about society, but if so then the essence of the game seems to have been lost within that point. In substance, the game has significant narrative flaws as well. Multiple major plot points are never resolved, the chronology of certain events is never explained, and characters just appear and disappear at will without explanation or purpose, sometimes in the middle of a scene. If this was intentional, it certainly did not feel like it. These mechanical and substance issues combine to create an experience that feels simultaneously too linear and too convoluted. Again, I enjoyed the vibe, the music, and the main underlying story of the society itself, but finishing this game I can't help but feel that the narrative and character writing was two or three drafts shy of being complete. All that being said, I enjoyed it enough to wish that it could have been more enjoyable.

An adventure game through and through, just with the sort of engines (item puzzles, navigation, winnable dialogue trees) that generally drive those games replaced with an examination of your own instincts. The main concern of the gameplay is how you respond to the idea of a choice, even when that choice cannot result in a fail state, which in this game, as far as I know, it cannot. As such It's going to ask you to give something over to it, it requires a sense of curiosity about how you can work in tandem with the story and a willingness to Play rather than to Game, if you catch my drift. And if you are willing to give that to it it becomes an incredible work not just about art and how we interface with it (either as artists or audience members) but also debt, community, what there is to do about the rot of capital slowly snuffing out every bit of life America has got. It's one of my favorite games I've ever played.

If you read other reviews you'll see that they say that KR0 is a piece of modern art, not a game. They are correct, but let me review it as such then. Because if I were to review it as a game the score would be very low. There is no gameplay.It is painfully slow in too many episodes. It would score a bit for stylish looks but boredom and tediousness would earn it something like 2/10. Now back to reviewing this as an artistic expression. I like modern art. I like things that evoke feelings and don't necessarily require reason to be appreciated. But KR0 is not a modern art picture, its not a white rectangle on white background. KR0 is one of those video or sound installations that modern art museums show looped in separate small "movie theaters". At best they are provocative or thought-producing. At worst nonsensical. KR0 fluctuates between the two. But then again, would you really spend 10 plus hours of your life in one of those "movie theaters"? I chose not to. So overall even as a form of modern art it lacks some foundation to be interesting. The more grounded parts it has are better than the artistic ones but they are far and between. 4/10. Do not recommend. Go to a modern art museum instead.

I love this game. Surreal, funny, and emotionally resonant. If you like David Lynch, play this game.

An American tragedy. A mystery, you could call it "Entertainment". Objectively a video game, if we were better a naming things we would call it something else.