Critical Compilation - Kentucky Route Zero

§KENTUCKY ROUTE ZERO

GDC Vault - Designing for Mystery in Kentucky Route Zero

§

Interview: Kentucky Route Zero’s Mountain Of Meanings

§

Global economic crisis, local history, American literature: The two hours of the first episode give you many interesting things to discover (and there is so much more).
/.../
Act Two focuses on architecture, philosophy and different perspectives on questions of migration and socio-cultural issues of home.
/.../
When we started this series, the discussion about Kentucky Route Zero consisted almost exclusively of David Lynch references and the question about when the next episode was going to be released. Luckily, this has changed.

§

The Endless Night of Kentucky Route Zero
Later in the game, when Conway says something is going to happen “in the morning” the very idea is laughable. There’s two episodes left of Kentucky Route Zero, and I get the feeling that morning is somehow never going to come. Even if it does… it won’t really come. I’ll still be in the bar, at a party, in the dark, or on the Zero, marveling at the impossibility of dawn.

§

To varying degrees, all video games seem to see themselves as mere shades of the Platonic ideal of the video game: the holodeck.
/.../Then, we have games like Kentucky Route Zero, which don’t.

And while Kentucky Route Zero does ostensibly exist within a video game space, it is more interested in the function of spaces within that space. It is based on the expressive forms of experimental theater, installation art and modernist literature, not on the ideal of the holodeck. It creates non-Euclidean spaces that cannot exist, not as an expression of the possibilities of video game space when unshackled by the constraints of the real world, but as an outright rejection of the common standard of video game spaces.

§

Design Live - Kentucky Route Zero - Livestream Playthrough and Analysis

§

Design Live - Kentucky Route Zero - Livestream Playthrough and Analysis 2

§

By elevating the player above a single-perspective experience, Kentucky Route Zero actually enriches its capacity for narrative agency. You aren’t confined to a single viewpoint through which to access and assess the narrative, but are, instead, present through all perspectives.
/.../
The characters feel believable because you are crafting not just how a character responds in a present moment, but also what their backstory is. You shape these characters across planes in time in a way that makes them feel complex, multi-dimensional, and real. In Kentucky Route Zero you not only construct what the past was, but define why it has bearing on a character and their actions in the game’s present. That these actions occur simultaneously to your attempts to situate them brings the multi-dimensionality of the characters directly to the foreground of the game, and makes it the ludic function by which players advance.

§

Ranging from despondent, bitter to hopeful, each choice holds a mirror to the player, asking them a basic question that games rarely if ever bother asking: “How do you feel?”

By doing so, Kentucky Route Zero is able to achieve something important: It includes the player in its narrative process even though the narrative is linear. Every choice you make in the game affects your experience of it and how you contextualize the characters within it more than the actual plot itself.
/.../
As dawn approaches in Kentucky Route Zero, maybe the sun shall shine not just on the ever-evasive quandaries of the world that its characters seem to grapple with, but also on aspects of our own selves and who we really are when we interact with seemingly static choices in a world fated by its script.

§

I love that Kentucky Route Zero does so much to make me feel richly invested in its world without making me feel like it's only through my presence there that the world matters. I want to see more and more games do this. Because if my story is the only one that matters, then nothing matters, since it's only through our connections with each other that the meaning in our stories can reveal itself.

§

Bright light filters in from the wide front windows of the Emporium Arcade Bar in Chicago's Wicker Park neighborhood. Jake Elliott and Tamas Kemenczy, the two halves of indie developer Cardboard Computer, sit next to each other, each nursing a pint full of dark beer.

§

There is an important part in Kentucky Route Zero Act II when Shannon says, "Are we inside or outside?"
You can choose between three answers: "Inside." "Outside." Or "Both."