Five years later, Kentucky Route Zero’s conscious engagement with other mediums still makes an impact.
Kentucky Route Zero is celebrating its five-year anniversary today, January 28, 2025.
Below, we look back at its inspirations and excitement for experimentation.
It is in the details that Kentucky Route Zero stakes its claim beyond video games.
The terse descriptions of characters between bursts of dialogue.
The adventure game actions written like stage directions.
Lights that illuminate the new parts of a stage or set.
It is the details that matter.
It is no secret that video games can be a little self-obsessed.
When a big game attempts a big homage to genuine artistic legacy, it can feel absurd.
Who could possibly take Ghost of Tsushima’s “Kurosawa mode” seriously?
It is, in a word, pretty far outside the regular span of video games.
This is not to say that KRZ is ashamed of or above its adventure-games roots.
It also stakes its claim within video games, sometimes in grand overt gestures.
It will reply “games is not real.”
In Act 3, you interface with a gigantic machine which plays a version of Colossal Cave Adventure.
It is, undoubtedly, pretentious.
But it also puts video game influences alongside the literary and theatrical without a lot of fuss.
Of course these things belong together.
Why wouldn’t they?
That matter-of-factness grants KRZ a lot of ground to explore its own formal qualities.
Of course, it is important that we not give into astonishment.
BioShock Infinite is perhaps the most grandiose and spectacular example of this.
There are also plenty of great games which also pull beyond the medium’s cliches.
Disco Elysium and Signalis made big splashes for similar reasons.
Norco was unfairly compared to Kentucky Route Zero for drawing on a different set of Americana.
Each of its five acts are, to some degree, daring formal exercises.
This is perhaps explained by how eager it is to reinvent itself.
Every act, released individually, does feel like something new.
Main characters vanish never to appear again and the player’s control and perspective alter constantly.
The camera turns on a swivel placed in the center of town.
The question is sort of funny on its face.
What makes KRZ strange and exciting in video games is far more commonplace in essentially every other medium.
It is easy, and understandable, to denigrate KRZ’s contributions for this reason.
But what this fosters in me is a sense of indebtedness.
Self-evidently, great art steals, but that theft is not one of ownership.
It’s more like a torrent.
Every other copy still exists; many of them have their pieces in yours.
It’s a internet.
Any theft pulls a string, tying the knot further.
Kentucky Route Zero is a powerful work of art, because it is an invitation.
Many games are eager to bring you into their world, to make it consume you.
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