![]() ![]() ![]() Lynch’s work has always moved along the edge of horror, which makes his actual forays into that realm incredibly terrifying. It is precisely because of this that I think various connections drawn between Kentucky Route Zero and the films of David Lynch are warranted. A horror game would exploit this Kentucky Route Zero leaves you totally ambivalent toward that condition. In this way, the game is about finding a total joy in the total absence of a reasonable world. Instead, I am merely kept in the dark and made to enjoy it. I am never told why my lack of information is a lack. Kentucky Route Zero depends on this same kind of information withholding, but the stakes are never made clear to us. Tension is generated from this process and makes everything, as Aristotle would say, “all scary.” It all depends on a lack of information and a knowledge of what that lack means–I can’t see down that corridor, and I know I could be jumped at any moment by a monster, so I am forced to dread the encounter until it happens. In essence, the modern horror game is one long, split up jump scare. As I’ve noted in my varied readings of horror games, that genre is heavily dependent on keeping the player from knowing things, particularly by limiting sensory information. I’m much more interested in the presence and absence of information as it is given to the player. What I am saying is that it is interesting, but I don’t care about it enough yet. The first act is very much a first act in that we become aware of the players and then watch them move. While they resonate with me, I can’t really say that they’re amazing until I know where they go. I’m not particularly interested in these plot details at this point. ![]() We follow them into abandoned homes, to gas stations, deep into mines filled with emotional trauma. We aren’t sure what Shannon is looking for, but she is along for the ride no matter what. Conway is looking for Route Zero to make his delivery. We can retread the story so far: you follow Conway, an antique shop truck driver, and sometimes Shannon, a t.v. It is, as Daniel has noted, about presence and absence, about here and there, and about knowing that something is missing in the world. The game is about The South, and apparently people thing that is really important, despite the game being nothing like the Southern experience that I’ve had for the past forever. If you care about the conversation that has been happening around the game, look to RPS here, here, and here. I’m not going to address the comparisons to The Walking Dead that everyone is making (which I don’t understand at all). 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.Warning: some vague spoilers about Kentucky Route Zero. 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. 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. ![]() Those who are already lost may find their way to a secret highway winding through underground caves. 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. ![]()
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