![]() In fact, you can experience it right now, from your phone, for free: Dialing (270) 301-5797 leads one to a surreal automated menu for the fictional bureau. The most impressive metatextual element is not even technically in the game: it's a phone number that you dial, for the Echo River Tourism Bureau, which is alluded to in gameplay. It is post-modern in the realest sense of the word, in that it transcends the gaming form, and comments on itself - something known as "metatext" by academics. If I were forced to define it, I might call "Kentucky Route Zero" a twenty-first century merger of a Southern Gothic and magical realist novel. In between those two poles, your imagination fleshes out the characters. ![]() ![]() The game's art is surreal and blocky, which opens up just enough of one's imagination that half the story is in one's head: the character's body movements are pained and emotive, yet their expressions blank. Composer Ben Babbitt's " Long Journey Home," appearing in the game's first act, is a catchy and melancholic banjo folk ballad that sounds as if it were directly recorded from a rural Kentucky farmhouse's creaky front porch. Indeed, music is intrinsic to the experience, and the game features a haunting, kitschy, folk-inspired soundtrack, which can be streamed on Spotify. The music changes dynamically as the player presses their verse of choice - letting the user dynamically write the song as it's being performed. In another scene, an experimental band takes the stage at a dive bar. In one scene, you're in a small community theater, turning in circles, listening to the dialogue of actors on stage, then turning towards the audience, then back again the lighting and the sound shift as you do. The week that Donald Trump lost the electionĪ new #Resistance hero emerges amid the Trump endgame: The dutiful civil servantĪnd let's talk about that weird, sprawling story. It is written in five "acts," with entr'actes that often bring in briefly-mentioned side characters and expand upon them. There's no need to memorize when to push X or ▢ or ◯, and it's near-impossible to get lost or "stuck." Related Articles Better yet, it eschews the problem of the vast majority of video games, namely, that they are too reliant on tropes of user interface control that only a seasoned gamer would understand. What makes it qualify as a Gesamtkunstwerk, you ask? "Kentucky Route Zero" merges screenplay, theater, music, design, art and telephony. Yet what keeps them going is their communitarian bonhomie, revealed through dialogue and the quick friendships one strikes with these helpful strangers. While the makers self-describe it as a "magical realist adventure game," the game's major underlying theme is that of rural poverty and of community: the characters confess to their struggles with healthcare, or with money, or with artistic success, or with government bureaucracy.
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