At twilight in Kentucky, as bird songs give way to the choir of frogs and insects, familiar roads become strange, and it's easy to get lost. Those who are already lost may find their way to a secret highway winding through underground caves. The people who live and work along this highway are themse...
At twilight in Kentucky, as bird songs give way to the choir of frogs and insects, familiar roads become strange, and it's easy to get lost. Those who are already lost may find their way to a secret highway winding through underground caves. The people who live and work along this highway are themselves a little strange at first, but soon seem familiar: the aging driver making the last delivery for a doomed antique shop; the young woman who fixes obsolete TVs surrounded by ghosts; the child and his giant eagle companion; the robot musicians; the invisible power company lurking everywhere, and the threadbare communities who struggle against its grip.
KENTUCKY ROUTE ZERO is a magical realist adventure game in five acts, featuring a haunting electronic score, and a suite of hymns and bluegrass standards recorded by The Bedquilt Ramblers. Rendered in a striking visual style that draws as much from theater, film, and experimental electronic art as it does from the history of videogames, this is a story of unpayable debts, abandoned futures, and the human drive to find community.
Originally published episodically over a span of years, the game now includes all five acts along with the "interludes," which were originally published separately. It has also been painstakingly localized for French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Russian, and Spanish (both European Spanish and Latin American).
Copyright 2013 Cardboard Computer, LLC All rights reserved
Popular achievements
Act I
Complete Act I.
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32.09%
Goodies
wallpapers
Act I soundtrack (MP3)
Act II soundtrack (MP3)
Act I soundtrack (FLAC)
Act II soundtrack (FLAC)
Interlude - The Entertainment (PC)
Interlude - The Entertainment (Mac)
Interlude - Limits and Demonstrations (PC)
Interlude - Limits and Demonstrations (Mac)
Act III soundtrack (MP3)
Act III soundtrack (FLAC)
Interlude - Here And There Along The Echo (Windows)
Interlude - Here And There Along The Echo (Mac)
Interlude - The Entertainment (Linux)
Interlude - Limits and Demonstrations (Linux)
Interlude - Here And There Along The Echo (Linux)
Act IV soundtrack (FLAC)
Act IV soundtrack (MP3)
Interlude - Un Pueblo De Nada (Windows)
Interlude - Un Pueblo De Nada (Mac)
Interlude - Un Pueblo De Nada (Linux)
Act V soundtrack (MP3)
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It's fine as far as it goes - although it has only gotten as far as Act III as of March 2015. The developer has recently stopped saying when the last two instalments will be released now that the announced dates have slipped several times already. If you can live with that - and the distinct possibility that what you buy today may be all the episodes you'll ever see - go for it.
Sorry of this sounds a little cynical. But I've been burned by far too many indy game Kickstarters in the last few years. So I'm nowhere near as confident about small independent game projects as I once was. Their hearts may be in the right place. But good intentions only carry you so far.
100% worth the asking price. An absolute steal on sale. Best if played in pieces with a few days or even a week or two spacing out the chapters. Treat it like a book, give it some space and set aside some time in the day to play without distractions. Its worth it
A wonderfully put together multimedia expression of rust belt melancholy. Thoughtful, as much as thought-provoking. Its pace is slow very much by design. Some might take that as a negative, I would urge anybody to slow down for a bit and just enjoy this ride.
The worst bit of my experience with this game is that I couldn't find the banjo tabs for some of the songs. But I think my favorite quote from the game applies in that case-
"...I know just about every story on this river, most of them I've picked up second-, third-, or fourth-hand and so on. Listening, see?
Now I know what you're going to ask, so I'm gonna answer it: yes, I'm sure they're all 'true.' I personally believe story gets more true as it's tossed around from brain to brain and the whole community brings their insight to bear on the brittle facts of experience."
I expect to be playing the true notes of these songs for a long time after I last close this game.
This is by no means a game for everyone. A good correlate for whether you'll love KRZ is if you enjoy literature. The storytelling and writing in this game is challenging, subtle, and rich. The pacing is steady and sometimes slow. It's not a game to binge but to pick up and put down so you can chew on and reflect on the experience. Go into it willing to give it some time to put hooks in you and you may find, like me, that it's the best game you've ever played.
KRZ is a beautiful, haunting experience that has an amazing sense of atmosphere to it. What seems like a simple task of finding an address to make a delivery becomes a wierd, surreal journey through the kentucky backwoods and the interesting folks who live there. It feels both like a David Lynch film and a look at some of the more remote parts of the country still mired in the great recession and it somehow works.
The only problem, aside from maybe it's length(each episode is maybe 2 hours if you explore everywhere) is that it's still not complete. Act IV came out in 2017 and Act V was intially set to be released "Early 2018" which then became "2018" and as of December 2018(when this is written) there's still no word of when to expect Act V). Considering the game is best experienced as a whole and not waiting a year between Acts, wait until the game is finished(Hopefully early 2019) before playing it.
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