Act I
In the face of the Call of Duty-driven FPS ascendancy, I’d become someone who demanded more from games. As a young writer with an underdeveloped critical toolkit and the overconfidence that often comes along with that, I could just tell that Cardboard Computer’s pitch for KRZ was promising the sorts of things that I was desperate to see more of, and which I hoped the then-burgeoning “indie boom” would bring.I was right, but what I couldn’t predict was that not only would these naive hopes of younger self be met, they’d actually be exceeded. Put simply: Kentucky Route Zero is greater than whatever buzzwords are used to sell it. It makes me want to write with the fervor of naivete, yet rewards serious engagement. It’s a masterful American tragedy that avoids the cheapest tendencies of games like it, while leveraging techniques distinct and unique to gaming as a medium. Nine years after it was announced, the journey has been worth every day. I doubt I could be happier with it.Kentucky Route Zero is greater than whatever buzzwords are used to sell it.
Act II
Act III
PEARL: You know what we do at the pawn shop? "Secured loans." We don't buy used goods, we take personal property as collateral on a loan. Then if you don't pay your loan, we sell your stuff.
HARRY: Sure, I get that.
PEARL: It works for people who couldn't get loans otherwise. I guess. Now Hardin has this new idea. He calls it a "payday advance." But it's just a short-term, unsecured loan with a wicked interest rate. There's no filtering. Most who borrow can't keep up. Then he has this big pile of debts with big returns on paper, and he can sell those debts to a bank.
HARRY: Huh. Who's borrowing like that?
Ah. The stage was set for further tragedy about the systemic exploitation upon the vulnerable, something only furthered by KRZ’s third act. By about halfway through the third chapter, it was clear that the game’s core cast was settling, and that you’d spend the bulk of this adventure with a disabled alcoholic past his prime, a working class Mexican woman, an orphaned child whose parents whose family had been made homeless during the subprime mortgage crisis, and a pair of androids designed for labor but who’d recreated themselves as stylish (and queer-coded) musicians. It was impossible for me to ignore that this was a game about the vulnerable and marginalized, those who fight to flourish in spite of the systems that demand they fail.PEARL: Who do you think? When Joe put me in charge of it? The only dark-skinned clerk in the whole shop?
Act IV
I don’t want to undersell this point, so: I just don’t know that KRZ works as a whole if it isn’t able to visually communicate the breadth, chaos, and seeming-impossibility of everyday life. It needs to be believable in its unbelievability. It wants to tell us that it isn’t strange that the puddles in the museum parking lot reflect the night sky so clearly that it feels like you’re running across the stars. That it isn’t weird that the trees in the second act’s forest blend foreground and background, sometimes occluding a character by showing what is behind them in their place. That it honestly isn’t all that surprising that Ezra’s brother is a giant eagle named Julian, nor that he knows how to use the phone."[One day] my wife and I were asleep and the doorbell rings. I open the door and a man says to me, 'I came to fix the ironing cord.' My wife, from the bed, says, 'We don't have anything wrong with the iron here.' The man asks, 'Is this apartment two?' 'No,' I say, 'upstairs.' Later, my wife went to the iron and plugged it in and it burned up. This was a reversal. The man came before we knew it had to be fixed. This type of thing happens all the time. My wife has already forgotten it."