Gamer's Paradise: Kentucky Route Zero Explores A Fictional Kentucky Labyrinth

In this recurring column, Leigh Alexander visits exciting new creative frontiers in the video game space, which is seeing a period of incredible growth and diversification, attracting new talent, and demonstrating intriguing innovation. Here she'll cover emerging artists, trends, and so much more.

Cardboard Computer's Kentucky Route Zero is among the darlings of this year's Independent Games Festival with a stunning four nominations—one for Excellence in Narrative, one for Excellence in Audio, one Excellence in Visual Design and one in the Seumas McNally grand prize tier.

It's an adventure game about a truck driver, whom we know only as Conway, trying to deliver antiques to an address in Kentucky. He gets lost along the way, and seeking help from the people he meets seems to urge him toward a highway called the Zero, which may not even exist.

It's a beautiful, rich painting that romanticizes the byways and backroads of the American south; lanky Conway and his equally-lanky old hound are silhouetted against massive sunsets alongside gas lights and farm houses, and the sonic landscape—the atmospheric buzz of incandescent light or the chorus of crickets, and occasionally the oddly-melancholy swell of bluegrass music—makes the entire experience absolutely transporting.

The signposts and markers of what we know “adventure games” to be are absent, though. The player guides Conway on his journey of purpose and alienation just by clicking on where he ought to walk, and he interacts with other players through conversation choices to progress the story, and that's really all. Aside from the ostensible goal of finding the Zero and making Conway's delivery, goals are obscured—there are no "puzzles." Characters appear and disappear without literal explanation, allowing the experience to feel more like an avant-garde play, restrained and postmodern. It's even being released in five "acts."

In all his interviews about the game, Jake Elliot (his development partner in Cardboard Computer is Tamas Kemenczy) has cited his own southern road explorations as an inspiration—as well as another iconic title of exploration in Kentucky.

The game commonly known as the “grandfather” of all adventures was 1976's Colossal Cave Adventure, a text-only game about underground exploration. Its author, Will Crowther, liked to explore Kentucky's Mammoth Cave system, and amid divorce he made the game as a way to share his hobby with his daughters.

The game's origin story didn't become widely known until those for whom it was a formative early experience of interactive entertainment could connect and gather via the internet. Mostly, Colossal Cave Adventure earned its enduring place in history because it was no ordinary cave exploration, but an unsympathetically minimalist and occasionally frustrating little game that often detoured into the surreal, with magic and treasures abundant.

Colossal Cave is beloved by history, but nowadays one might argue its disinclination to communicate with the player, the illogic of how its places bolt together with objectives and destinations unclear, don't gel with assumed best practices of game design or conventions of “storytelling,” (if there is even any). In the years since then, story has become the primary mandate of the adventure genre—that and puzzle design, where players generally stuff their virtual pockets with any object that isn't bolted down, and combine them within the environment to escape predicaments, salve strange characters or otherwise solve barriers to progress.

Like its inspiration, Kentucky Route Zero rejects the idea that story logic ought to be transparent, or that a game needs challenges or puzzles to take players on a meaningful adventure. It is never frustrating—in fact, it'd be meaningfully accessible even to someone with little to no “video gaming” vocabulary. The primary point of engagement in games is identifying who Conway is and what he's feeling through subtle choices in dialog—like whether to admit something hurts, or whether he has named his dog.

But it is provocative and touching, and continually prompts players to examine their relationship to it—as Conway's journey unfolds, does he reveal himself to be someone who shares himself with others, or not? Does he take an interest in the lives of the people around him or insist on pursuing the Zero?

Kentucky Route Zero seems at every turn to be gently questioning the player's own attitude to goals, and perhaps to technology and play, too. Early in the game, a group of people are too engaged in a nerdy board game to acknowledge Conway; he borrows a computer to help him find his way, and repairing and watching a TV forms a key plot point. In context the game seems to be asking us about the nature of engagement with ourselves and the people around us.

Increasingly, the games that most excite fans and the people who make them are less concerned with the "rules" that have previously defined how they ought to be made, or what qualifies something as a game if it doesn't have "challenges." Colossal Cave's similar obliviousness to those practices helped make it iconic—although the rules were yet to be defined in the time it was made.

Kentucky Route Zero, meanwhile, practices a very conscientious rejection of those parameters, and its broad celebration in the IGF feels like an important milestone for the games community's ongoing introspection about what it can be and do. It could be viewed as a study in its own choices, but it never stops feeling like an intimate, personal question about how we get our sense of value and fulfillment through interaction. It never feels overwhelming, but alongside the game's violet twilight and the purring of a truck engine, you can get lost in it. Or find yourself.

Previously: The Bleak, Toilsome World Of Cart Life

@leighalexander