8/9/2023 0 Comments Kentucky route zero platforms![]() ![]() Route Zero is a road of unknown provenance Act II introduced Ezra, whose brother Julian is a massive eagle, and Act III gave us the androids Junebug and Johnny, among others. But Conway’s bum leg and entanglement with a shady firm of glowing skeletons who strong-arm him into delivering their own goods have become but one note in an ever-growing chorus. ![]() Route Zero is a road of unknown provenance: the sections where you drive around to different locations are even rendered in a barely-there latticework of wireframes, as if Conway has found his way into a place where the world has yet to finish knitting itself together, and the boundaries between reality and everything outside are thin as spiderwebs. Way back in Act I, our protagonist appeared to be shit-luck truck driver Conway, who finds himself forced to take Route Zero to finish his deliveries. I wonder which kind of night this is.” Later, he says: “I listen to the river’s stories, and my own stories get fainter and fainter.” The game handles these moments of folksy philosophy with the same surety that it handles non sequiturs about bats with “white nose syndrome,” the use of certain herbal teas to lessen the pain of childbirth, or the overarching theme-if you can call it that for its light-footedness-of debt. “And some nights I meet an old friend on an unfamiliar shore. “Some nights I remember a place, but it’s full of strange new people,” Will says. The android musician Junebug joins him on the deck as he pores over the mammoth’s manual, and they briefly discuss their journey down the subterranean Echo River. To wit: Act IV begins with Will, a new addition to the cast, attempting to figure out how to repair a massive mechanical mammoth that sits abreast his steamboat’s bow. It’s emblematic of the game’s tone overall, which spikes absurdism with dry wit and careful doses of wounding sentimentality, deployed the way William Faulkner or Flannery O’Connor would loose sudden savage violence into the bowels of their fiction. There was zero fanfare: it was simply not there one moment, and the next, it was accessible from the game’s resolutely spartan menus. With characteristic nonchalance, Cardboard Computer dropped Act IV on July 19th. It is not merely about drifters, relics, and outcasts it drifts itself, and its distance from the pulse of popular culture is impressively vast. ![]() That pace, nonetheless, seems snugly of a piece with the bewildering brilliance it deigns to reveal a little more of every so often. A five-part drama that’s equal parts magical realism and Southern Gothic, it’s been doled out act-by-act at a painfully slow pace since 2013. Kentucky Route Zero is not merely about drifters, relics, and outcastsĬardboard Computer’s Kentucky Route Zero has pulled several such feats of watching over its years-long lifespan. ![]()
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