The Tar Pit

"Do you have any debts?"
"I owe some people some apologies."

Kentucky Route Zero is... well, how shall I put it? I don't exactly know how to put it in a straight manner, so I will instead make a quick detour.

If we take a look through The Tar Pit's gaming category, we notice a few things. First off, we notice that it's one of the sparser categories this blog has seen; and merely for being sparse (if nothing else), it doesn't encompass a wide variety of genres. For example, when I was a wee lad I used to play Heroes of Might and Magic II, which I never reviewed; or Fallout, which I did, only in Romanian; or Quake. In the last years, however, I chose to wander into more obscure corners of the so-called "adventure" genre, towards Ellison's thing; or I took a look at some game series made by some "indie" studio; and lately I didn't even take a look at those.

So it shouldn't come as a surprise that the name Annapurna Interactive doesn't really ring any bells to the average gamer. Upon a quick inspection of their website, I notice that they have a decent number of titles in their collection, but none of them really speaks to me -- with the notable exception of Kentucky Route Zero, developed by a group of three folks, who are rather, I suppose, writers more than they are "game developers". And this is in fact precisely the points towards which my detour was driving towards: Kentucky Route Zero, much like those other "computer games" that I previously mentioned on this blog, or at least most of them, isn't actually much of a game, but rather an interactive story of sorts.

Kentucky Route Zero is in fact a collection of stories, each belonging, let's say, to some character -- stories which together form a small, sad, beautiful, however (in)consistent universe. The game's setting is largely predominated by a poverty which I suppose constitutes most of the "realism": much of the world is, in that day and age, owned by one Consolidated Power Company, a metaphor for those who through some circumstance or another would take that which used to be yours, then simply repackage it and sell it to you as if it were some brand new shiny product. Thus there is, for example, no way for the "player" to change old Conway's destiny, as we watch helplessly how he gets himself into the worst possible deals, culminating with the final one, in which he gives away his soul.

The whole atmosphere, barren as it finds itself, as well as the indirect storytelling style reek of Lynch, among others which are thoroughly referenced throughout the game -- surely, the name Márquez wasn't chosen at random, for example. The player/viewer is presented with various symbols (the horses, the radio/TV, the cassette tape or even eel-ek-tree-city! itself) which connect him or her to some aspect of this universe, chief among them Route Zero, an intricate maze of... magical mystery, I suppose, if you're willing to call it that. Moreover, the interludes provide plenty of (both implicit and explicit) context to the overall story, if only nowadays' busy gamers had the patience to let the multitude of paragraphs of dialogue and storytelling lead them to places.

I think I found out about Kentucky Route Zero in 2014, in any case, way before the whole five acts were published. And I will most certainly replay the game at some point, if only because each dialogue option opens the path towards some other piece of the story, while at the same time it takes other pieces away from the player's purview... just like in real life!

Filed under: food for the soul, gaming.
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