Last week I played Kentucky Route Zero and I’m pretty sure I liked it.

If you don’t know, KRZ is a narrative adventure game released episodically through the 2010’s. You follow a handful of drifters, more hazy sketches than characters, while they roam around a dreamscape of Americana. It was one of the real watersheds for Games as Art, explicitly literary and uninterested in being a traditional video game. But you could get all that from the Wikipedia page.

You know that meme of the crying ogre, blubbering about how he can’t understand James Joyce’s Ulysses? That was kind of how I felt. I kept up with Disco Elysium without much fuss, but KRZ made me aware of the edges of my own literacy. I didn’t know what I didn’t know, and I knew it.

See, I love media analysis. Sometimes a good critique hits the spot just as well as the primary text. Hell, it’s been a decade since my last English class and I’m posting essays to this subreddit that nobody made me write. But from that, I admit I get some satisfaction from the idea that I think more deeply about stories than most people. I chuckle when I see someone claim Metal Gear Solid is “apolitical” or misidentify the villain in Obsession. The human brain loves a justification to feel superior to others, and mine’s no different (even when it tells me that it is). In this specific case, it’s a trait I’d consider mildly toxic but mostly harmless.

At no point playing this game did I dislike it, but I felt a pretty wide range of emotions, including a slight bruising to the intellectual ego. So this is less a review of KRZ and more how it felt being notably out of my depth, academically speaking.

Acts I and II are simple enough. The thrust is a mysterious delivery to an address that may or may not exist, but it’s soon clear that the destination matters not. Conway’s and Shannon’s journey is a collection of surreal vignettes, dotted with moments of vulnerability with people who we never get to know too well. I especially love the musical breaks (

Spoiler

synth bossa is iconic!!Conway succumbing to alcoholism is tragic, but his departure from the story has such little fanfare, the others’ response is so subdued, that I almost missed it

. I’m positive I’d get more out of it on another playthrough, but on first pass I found it opaque and hard to connect with, like it wasn't concerned with me understanding it.

“Meet me in the middle,” says Kentucky Route Zero. I take a step forward, it takes a step back. “Meet me in the middle,” says Kentucky Route Zero.

(Don’t take that seriously, I just thought it was funny.)

As I drift along the Zero, I can feel ideas dissipate in my head before they can solidify. Two neurons conspire to merge into a Thought, but I can’t get them close enough to make the connection. Grasping for a reference point, my brain groggily pulls the term “Magical Realism” out of its ass, but not the definition. This happens a few times, actually. Is this what David Lynch movies are like? I haven’t seen any. Is this what the Beats were writing about, or did I only think of that because I’m also On a Road right now? All I remember about them is my old classmate who thought Kerouac sucked shit.

Please don’t interpret any of this as a serious complaint, I'm exaggerating a little. At the end of the day, KRZ is enjoyable and easy to recommend if you like to read. I just found this aspect of my experience amusing and slightly humbling. It’s good for me to wade into deeper waters and get out of my comfort zone sometimes. Right now I’m enjoying other people’s writing on KRZ, which has been very illuminating after the fact, as well as that Robert Frost poem that gets referenced, “The Death of the Hired Man.”

If you made it here, I’d love to hear about a game/book/movie that made you the ogre: lost, bewildered, doubting your own faculties. I promise I won’t judge. And if anyone comments "Huh, I thought KRZ was really easy to understand actually" then I might cry lmao

Well written critique, you write how I think; youre dangerously self-effacing too. Be careful with that or you'll lose your face. But dont try to save face either, leave the egg there and own up to who you are.

Hopefully this reddit comment is witty and surreal enough to belong under your critique of KRZ.

(Ive never played the game, I just enjoyed your writing.)

Oh yeah, here's the ogre if you haven't seen it: https://www.reddit.com/r/tumblr/s/8HScsx7A3L

I feel very similarly - I loved much of the game but got frustrated when individual threads did not cohere into an understandable story. I also thought that the last act felt like an anticlimax. But I am also a crying ogre and am just smart enough to know how stupid I am.

Thank you for this! I adore KR0 and I’m constantly recommending it, but my adoration is because it is so different to every other game I’ve ever played. it’s poetic, it’s takes it form from stage plays instead of cinema (which many videogames ape). It does fascinating things with changing perspective (where youre playing as one character and all of a sudden it shifts to another). It has incredible use of diegetic music. It’s achingly melancholic (I'm a sucker for this). It has interesting things to say about addiction, and regret, and institutional debt.

But it also boring at times, and hard to understand at others, and I too was aware that there were loads of references to theatre and poetry that were going over my head. I didn’t find it an easy game to complete, but at the same time I found it incredibly rewarding. I’ve probably thought about it more than any other game I’ve ever played.

There are some really interesting analyses of it around if you look. (I seem to recall a good one on RockPaperShotgun)

Re the end of your post (excellent post btw) Glissant's "Poetic Intention" made me feel similar. In a reflection essay for the class I read it for I described the experience of reading it as feeling like I was above and behind my head.

I felt pretty similar to you at first, but I think that's due to how we got to play the game (or at least I think we both did). I played it after all chapters were already out, and to me it was a continuous experience, so what actually happens in the story took a front seat.

But those who played as it came out, with each chapter months apart, it must have been very different.

On that note, I really like the video Noah Caldwell-Gervais has on KZR and he really hits the point in my opinion - he even starts the video with pretty much what you discussed in your post.

Amazing writeup. I felt very similar to you (and seemingly everyone else commmenting). One of the things that made the game feel more dense (at least for me) was that KRZ had very little "game" to it. It always felt more like an immersive experience, akin to walking through a very surreal and visually impressive museum.

You mention Disco Ellysium, which is another game a lot of people enjoy thinking about, albeit much less cognitively dense than KRZ. In Disco you still have stats, dialogue choice, etc.; traditional game mechanics that allow for player agency. A lot of the memorable artsy games I've played have some aspect of "doing something", or a task given to the player. Before your eyes asks players to consider how long they can resist blinking. Braid had players solve puzzles. Just my opinion, but I almost think KRZ could have be equally served in video format or as a slide show, or in person exhibit.

I cannot recommend Noah Caldwell-Gervais’ video essay on this game enough. While obviously no one’s interpretation of this game is “correct”, I doubt there’s a person whose interests and predilections match up more with KRZ than her. From road trips, Americana, the destruction of the American working class, poetry, plays, old videogames and movies, it feels like she was the exact intended audience.

The main thing you're likely missing is the experience of coming into contact with these stories in real life. The generational poverty of the South has made for plenty of incredible and heartbreaking stories, and Kentucky has a particular flavor of it. This game might be a little more fantastical than real life, but life can be pretty strange as well.

lol thank you. I'm not trying to put myself down too much, I just thought it'd be fun if "I didn't get it" was my thesis. Though, no joke, it's a little vulnerable to admit you don't understand something on the internet

Wonderful bit of writing. Honestly, these kinds of thoughts are why I love KRZ. It challenged me in a way no other game has done. Or any media, for that matter. Also, many of the ideas you had were echoed during my own experience, especially the "Magical Realism" remark, found that amusing.

But also, I felt a similar thing, like the Cyring Ogre, while reading Nietzsche. I found the writing so dense and difficult to parse I felt completely lost in what was actually meant to be said. Still haven't finished that book...

KR0 is one of my favorite experiences ever and yeah I guess to go along with what you wrote I often didn’t entirely follow everything that was going on and missed so so much (which is why it’s infinitely replay able) but when they buried the horses at the end I wept like a baby and I couldn’t articulate exactly why.

I just found it so profoundly moving. Can’t think of too many other works that got me like that.