![]() ![]() ![]() The goal set out in the first act becomes a distant memory as you continue, getting lost on the Zero and then the Echo, prowling for secret locations to explore, and losing track of yourself. Conway is your gateway character, but soon you get to play Shannon, Ezra, Junebug, Johnny, a cat, and so many others. You're following the plot as one of the many named characters, but the more you're tasked with inhabiting them and controlling their actions, the less you care about what you were doing before. It all works to create this dreamlike flow, much like the Echo, which is a river you encounter later in the game. Source: Cardboard Computer (Image credit: Source: Cardboard Computer) The rules change slightly between each, moving you between just controlling Conway to jumping between a handful of characters by having you control a cat, for example. Each act and interlude is connected via characters, theme, and story, but the way each moves is unique. In an interview with USGamer, sound designer Ben Babbitt noted how Kentucky Route Zero feels like "we made 10 different games." While he meant that in response to how long it took to make, it does legitimately feel like that. In another, you are given nothing but a phone and a phone number, which you can call either through the game or on your actual phone. You can only walk around in a circle, touching buttons to turn the works of art on, and then you just have to sit and listen or watch. One, as an example, takes place in a museum installation by one of the characters. Cardboard Computer uses these to play around with the concept of interaction, giving players different ways to experience them. These shorter stories take place at various points in the Kentucky Route Zero timeline and feature a lot of the same characters (many of them focus on a trio you meet early in Act I), but they're more abstract. The Zero itself is an amorphous, ever-shifting highway where you have to follow directions like "turn around at the Crystal."īeyond just the five acts there are also five interludes. They all chatter about you as you wander around. At another moment slightly later you find yourself in the Museum of Dwellings, which is a museum depicting different dwellings (it's in the name) but is also the home of the people those dwellings once belonged to. In one vignette you have to go up and down a bureaucratic office building to find some information one of the floors is for the bears. It's tough to truly explain what Kentucky Route Zero is without spoiling it. You almost forget about the original goal as you get inundated with more characters and their stories, more locales, and more acts of high strangeness. It's about the aforementioned Conway and the delivery he has to make, but it only grows from there. It's tough to truly explain what Kentucky Route Zero is without spoiling it because it's absolutely worth experiencing without knowing much ahead of time. Source: Annapurna Interactive (Image credit: Source: Annapurna Interactive) You might notice that quite a few elements - from the art direction to even basic plot details - have changed, so it was a constant process even for the developers at Cardboard Computer. What would this game be about? If you take a look at the Kickstarter you can see what the game was expected to look like. The potential was there from the get-go, but there were still many questions. However, it was tough to see just from this first episode where Kentucky Route Zero would go over the next decade (along with how it would take seven years to reach Act V). ![]() It was all set up for the dream-like world players would be entering once Conway actually got going on the Zero. Over the first act, he has some strange encounters, introducing the player to how the game will bend the laws of reality in clever, sometimes funny ways. To get there, he has to find the Zero, a mysterious highway system that he learns about through a series of ever-increasingly weird and possibly supernatural people. It was atmospheric, mostly, capturing the pastoral and gloomy color palette that'll carry over into the other episodes - called Acts - along with the setup for a story involving a truck driver named Conway on his final delivery. ![]()
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