The Weirdness of Kentucky Route Zero (2016) | Hacker News Reader

The Weirdness of Kentucky Route Zero (2016)

blog.joshhaas.com

124 pointsolvy031 comments

Kentucky Route Zero is an absolute masterpiece in my opinion and is more of an experience than a true game. It really helps to read some critical analysis of the game after playing it to to get a better understanding and appreciation for the historical background that is being referenced.

The game is part adventure, part ghost story, part commentary on the fading american dream, and part artwork. It sounds pretentious, but it never felt that way to me. It is really hard to describe the game and the plot.

It is my favorite game along with Journey.

Innuendo Studios has a good 8 minute video essay on it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yl6OYyU4rl8

Experience is absolutely the right way to describe KRZ. I feel like it shares a lot of the same DNA as Visual Novel style games too. I just finished Snatcher for the first time, and got similar “feelings” while playing and reading through it all.

I agree with everything you wrote, so you sound like me - in that case, try out the game Omori, which just released. It's right up there with Journey and Kentucky Route Zero. It really is That Good.

Bookmarking this

I'll definitely check that out. When I was younger I loved playing practically any video game, but as I've aged, I only play a few games a year and they generally need to be pretty unusual and heavy on the story side. I want the experience and not the frustration of having to die fighting a boss 10x.

Your description reminds me of the Outer Wilds, the creator wrote a thesis on the game. While it is a bit awkward to get used to the time limit it's part exploration, part archeological adventure, part flight simulator and part platforming. The latter parts take a bit to get used to but really make the game fantastic. It's up there for me with journey and it sounds like I should really play KRZ. I just wish I could forget the Outer Wilds and play it again.

You've convinced me to play Outer Wilds.

Both were published by Annapurna Interactive. Along with Donut County, What Remains Of Edith Finch, and Gorogoa.

The only thing I've played that they've published that I felt let down by was Wattam, and that's probably substantially because my expectations were too high.

Eh, for me Donut County wasn’t that successful. Though my frame of comparison is Katamari.

Rolling things up, for whatever reason, seems to be more fun than swallowing them into a hole.

Yeah, I think that comparison is a little bit of a trap in that they seem more similar than they are.

They both offer a fundamentally similar mechanic (and I think I agree that Katamari's expression is more viscerally satisfying), but Katamari is about momentum and control and twitch judgement and pathfinding; Donut County is (mostly) about solving chill puzzles (easy but clever) and following the story.

Both have in common elaboration of their crazy worlds, clever dialog (though I think DC has an edge there), and great music (where I think Katamari has an edge).

I do think Katamari is quite a bit more replayable. Watching someone new play Donut County is a joy, but revisiting it myself for the Nth time is... not.

Oh nice - I've played most of those!

This game made me decide never to play an episodic game until all episodes are out. I lost interest and track of the characters and story during the interludes.

This article makes me want to play the final episode; the game's beautiful, subtle, and thoughtful in a way few developers dare.

I highly recommend playing the final episode. Interestingly I recall the devs mentioned Trump's win and the subsequent political tension caused a big change in the way the game was developed and the themes they wanted to include. So I don't know if the wait was so bad- I don't know what the last episode was originally meant to be, but the way it is now is a beautiful examination of the most painful, human, vulnerable pieces of the american dream.

Yup. It's wonderful game and thought provoking and I just gave up and didn't ever come back in that long long long gap before the last episode.

I did exactly this by accident. KRZ came recommended to me by a mate after a few episodes were out but I never got around to playing it. I did take the dive though last year when all the episodes were out and I'm glad I did as I think what happened to you would certainly have happened to me!

The final episode is definitely worth playing though. It's the emotional climax it needed, I think.

The most in-depth analysis of the themes in the first three acts of KRZ I've seen was published by superlevel.de. Unfortunately following a change to the website it's now only available through web archive (and a lot of interesting photographs are sadly missing):

https://web.archive.org/web/20190330120931/https://superleve...

Ah Kentucky Fried Zero. This is what I was referring to in my other comment I believe.

Possibly of interest to those who loved the music in the game... A Junebug album: https://junebug.bandcamp.com

(I've hard it in my playlist since discovering it exists.)

Here is some text from a review of Kentucky Route Zero I wrote in 2017.

“Are we there yet? This game is all story with no challenges or obstacles, just like a road trip ought to be. Immerse yourself in an artful rendition of our very human world and step into the dusty shoes of a man we have all seen in passing, but never stopped to get to know. He drives for the elusive Kentucky Route Zero - an underground road filled with legend and Americana. How do you find the middle of nowhere?“

For the purposes of understanding America’s heartland a little better, what’s better than playing Kentucky Route Zero is actually taking a real road trip through the flyover states.

Sort of interesting. I didn't think someone would make a game like that. I grew up (partially) in the Appalachian part of PA. I might look into playing it to see how relatable it is.

Also check out Night in the Woods, which was, confusingly, inspired by Kentucky Route Zero, while also being released before Kentucky Route Zero was completed.

Well, NitW was released first, but the story runs out of track about 80% through - not sure if they ran out of ideas or money.

Not sure what you mean?

I've had this game in my list to pick up ever since I got a ps4. However I only ever buy discs, so maybe this is a good sign that it will finally be available in my local store.

KRZ only had a limited physical release through iam8bit and it sold out shortly after it was released last year. Though it looks like it's also included in a collector's edition bundle of games from the publisher, albeit at a very high cost: https://www.iam8bit.com/products/annapurna-interactive-delux... It's also available DRM-free from GOG and Humble Bundle (the Steam release might also be DRM-free, but I haven't checked).

It'll probably still be very difficult to find physically, as it only had one limited release and that sold out almost instantly.

Fortunately, if you're not interested in the digital PS4 copy, you can purchase a DRM free download from their itch.io [1] which works on Windows, Mac, or Linux. Its a game that would run on a toaster, so not having a gaming computer isn't a barrier.

[1] https://cardboardcomputer.itch.io/kentucky-route-zero

I love this game so much. It's a masterpiece. I played it episode by episode first on PC and then again the whole game over a weekend on a PS4. Fantastic.

Kentucky Route Zero. Given the reviews I had to play it. And it's beautiful. But the story is really too long.

While I have not played the game this review is beyond useless with its postmodern Pynchonesque gibberish on entropy.

Neighbor, is a meditative little vignette along the lines of Mountain (2014) or Animal Crossing.

"You should play the new poetic game from the Kentucky Route Zero designers - Kill Screen": https://killscreen.com/previously/articles/cardboard-compute...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com