Kentucky Route Zero is more abstract, engaging not with judgement but with character and world building. It's an hour worth of subtle details, aural experimentation, weird occurrences and chilling scares, with nary a traditional 'puzzle' in sight. You move between a few small environments and engage in minor dialogue-heavy interactions, in which your answers often change the game's reality. In any early example, a man asks about the dog travelling with your avatar, and depending on your answer the dog is either a boy named Homer, a girl named Blue, or a complete mystery to you.
Not a whole lot happens in this first act. It's all set up, implicating a grander narrative, but what a beautiful set up it is. The game has the cadence of a postmodern ghost story (although you can miss some of the actual ghosts entirely if you don't look carefully), complete with obvious nods towards Twin Peaks and numerous other little odd scenes that may or may not be inspired by the films they remind us of. Between the scant few locations you visit along your journey, you're free to explore the area around you by clicking around a roadmap, fleshing out the creepiness of your surroundings - stop to observe certain points and you might find evidence of a car crash, a bizarre cafe that prompts some creepy text, or a tree that never stops burning.
You paint your own reality onto the events that transpire through your dialogue choices. It's not clear yet how, or even if, these choices will carry on between episodes, but unlike The Walking Dead it doesn't seem to matter at this point. The first act finishes all too soon, but it's hard to stop after an hour; you'll want to return and explore, and so little concrete is revealed that the idea of corning out of this act with a 'canon' playthrough doesn't gel.
Kentucky Route Zero is very much the sum of numerous exquisitely polished parts. The audio design is phenomenal, the soundtrack full of bumps in the night and perfectly timed musical cues, while the graphics are clean and pleasantly spooky. The writing is great too, purposely vague without being obtuse, and smart in a way surprisingly few games outside of the indie scene manage. In some ways this extremely short first act feels more like a teaser than a proper first episodic release, but it's interesting enough for us to sign up for the full season.
Developer: Cardboard Computer
Publisher: Cardboard Computer
Price: $7 (Act I), $22.50 (Full Season)
Out: Now
Web: kentuckyroutezero.com
