An unconventional adventure game that’s deeply cognizant of adventure game history, Kentucky Route Zero is a multilayered American tale shot through with profound concerns about debt, capitalism, and societal collapse. It’s also a rollicking road trip narrative about an unlikely bunch of traveling companions who find themselves on quite an adventure and who learn that a better world is possible, if we learn to leave the old ways behind.
Originally released in Acts that were spread out over the better part of a decade, Kentucky Route Zero’s release schedule tested my patience, but also took on larger significance because of its prolonged duration, as it almost seemed to be commenting in real time on the cracks in our society that were growing ever clearer throughout the 2010s. Kentucky Route Zero is a grand American epic, one that defies characterization and that certainly can’t be adequately summed up in a slideshow blurb. There are too many moments of lyrical beauty, of wondrous strangeness, of desperation and hope, loss and renewal.
But when I think about America and all the complex, contradictory feelings I have for this country, the simultaneous adoration and fear it stirs in me, this is easily the game that speaks to all of that most deeply and most truly. Kentucky Route Zero knows that this country exploits and dehumanizes so many of us, uses us up and casts us aside. It also knows that the ideal of promise and equality at the core of what this nation stands for is worth trying to actualize, together, and it dares, in its own way, to imagine what that might look like. It’s an American masterpiece.—Carolyn Petit
What games do you think have offered some insight, deliberately or otherwise, on the American experience? Let us know in the comments!