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- Cardboard Computer
- Cardboard Computer
- Cardboard Computer
- Cardboard Computer
Kentucky Route Zero
Released On: Feb 22, 2013
86
6.9
All Platforms
Metascore
Generally Favorable
Based on 10 Critic Reviews
86
90% Positive
9 Reviews
9 Reviews
10% Mixed
1 Review
1 Review
0% Negative
0 Reviews
0 Reviews
Metascore
Generally Favorable
Based on 10 Critic Reviews
86
90% Positive
9 Reviews
9 Reviews
10% Mixed
1 Review
1 Review
0% Negative
0 Reviews
0 Reviews
A magical adventure almost a decade in the making, Kentucky Route Zero is every bit as good as you've heard—and maybe more.
Quotation forthcoming.
User Score
Mixed or Average
Based on 74 User Ratings
6.9
57% Positive
42 Ratings
42 Ratings
18% Mixed
13 Ratings
13 Ratings
26% Negative
19 Ratings
19 Ratings
User Score
Mixed or Average
Based on 74 User Ratings
6.9
57% Positive
42 Ratings
42 Ratings
18% Mixed
13 Ratings
13 Ratings
26% Negative
19 Ratings
19 Ratings
nice and good game!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Report
PC
Very special, dreamlike and artful game centered around dialogue. You choose what your character says, but pretty quickly it becomes apparent that your choices does not affect the game outcome in any shape or form. The only thing you really choose is your own poetry, your own inner narrative. You have no control over where the game takes you. I found this absolutely fascinating and thought it elevated the game to greater heights. It's beautifully done. This game is for dreamers enjoying a mystery that maybe never will make sense.
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PC
Cardboard's work is an incredibly rich, complex, personal experience, but for which it is very easy to feel empathy, since it manages to tell from the popular and human perspective greater events of each of us. A piece of video game history.
By the final cut to black, we're looking forward to making more connections like the ones we find here, before we take our final turn off Interstate 65 and fall into the Zero's dark, enveloping embrace. [Issue#342, p.102]
A compelling story about rural America that is both surreal and thoughtful, if a little disorienting.
Kentucky Route Zero offers a unique narrative but somewhat frustrating experience that must be enjoyed at a slow pace.
Exceptional dialogue served even in most exquisite forms (mini-games, different perspective, mixed chronology) are still not enough for the story to be compatible with this medium or to be worth telling altogether. The result is slow and difficult to ingest and sometimes even unpleasant in its archaic mechanics. [03/2020, p.54]
Even though I have only played the first two acts, I have to say that Kentucky Route Zero is one of the most wonderful gaming experiences I've ever had. Apparently a point-and-click graphic adventure, this is actually much closer to an interactive graphic novel. It's really good literature, or art, or however you may categorize it. Obviously, though, the "game" dimension is only the method used to put the player in the middle of the story. The difficulty is trivial, and it consists merely in finding the way through the different locations on the map and sorting out the meaning of the quest, which is but an excuse for a compelling story about lonliness, frailty and oblivion.
Now, about the script: it's more than excellent, it's really over the scale. Whoever has written the texts in this game has obviously read a lot and written a lot, and knows who Don Delillo or Faulkner are. Very often the choice of dialogues does not have any consequence on the development of the story --- it's just meant to let the player co-author the story, add and choose the details that frame the main characters.
You won't like this game if you're looking for shiny entertainment and action, for real-time emotions where you can prove your gaming stamina. You will love this game if you enjoy art, design, reading a good story, and obviously if adventure games were your favorite genre. It's very hard to explain how fabulously original, simple, light and complex is the graphic aspect of this game. The map interface is a great idea and the medium by which minigames find their right place into the game, creating a spiraling sensation that destroys the common notion of space as the story approaches the zero. Slowly, also the environments lose features of reality and represent in a fascinating way the tricks of immagination, irrationality, oblivion and selflessness.
Just play the game, you won't ever forget it. Especially if you like good literature and contemporary art & design!
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PC
First off, this is not a game. It's an interactive novel. There is no skill, or luck, or strategy. There's certainly no goals to achieve — which is very much the point.
This is a story about people whose lives have been deprived of purpose by the corporate takeover and deindustrialization of the rural American south. It's a southern Gothic magic realist ghost story in which the characters do find a semblance of meaning and community in their broken lives, but not in the ways they expect.
I think the experience is enhanced if you go in knowing that Conway will never make that delivery which is the game's inciting incident, that none of the characters will find what they are nominally looking for, and that relationships and authenticity matter far, far more than extrinsic goals.
Video games are often fantasies of control but this is very much a story about finding meaning in a world that we cannot control, a world that has left us behind.
It didn't totally work for me; I found it a bit too surreal and elliptical to be really emotionally resonant. The sudden shifts of setting and the introductions of whole new casts of characters from one chapter to the next threw me off.
But the world that it conjures still lingers in my memory three years later and I might even replay it one day.
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PC
Summary Kentucky Route Zero is a magical realistic adventure game about a secret highway in the caves beneath Kentucky, and the mysterious folks who travel it.
Platforms:
- PC
Initial Release Date: Feb 22, 2013
Developer:
- Cardboard Computer
Publisher: Cardboard Computer
Genres:
