Kentucky Route Zero’s long-delayed final act finally closes the loop on a 13-year journey

Kentucky Route Zero is a game about a delivery that never quite arrives. Conway drives a truck for an antique shop owned by a woman named Lysette. He has one job: get a package to 5 Dogwood Drive. To do it, he has to find Route Zero, a secret highway running through the caves beneath Kentucky. The game follows him as he looks for it, and the strange people he meets along the way.

Cardboard Computer — the two-person team of Jake Elliott and Tamas Kemenczy — built the game in five acts, released between January 2013 and January 2020. It began on Kickstarter in 2011. It ended seven years later as one of the most talked-about works in independent games. Our score is 8.8 out of 10.

Trailer, via Cardboard Computer.

Conway Stops at Equus Oils

Conway is not a hero. He is a man with a job and a dog whose name the player chooses. He starts near Interstate 65, asking around for an address that seems not to exist. He stops at a gas station called Equus Oils. He keeps going.

That is the whole engine of the plot, and it is enough.

The game is a point-and-click adventure, but it strips out the parts most point-and-click games are built on. There are no traditional puzzles. There are no challenges of skill. You click to move Conway, or to interact with a character or an object. You choose his dialogue in conversations, and sometimes the dialogue of other characters. The game has been described as an “interactive screenplay,” and that is close to right.

What you are doing, moment to moment, is listening. Cardboard Computer put the weight on characterization, atmosphere and storytelling instead of clever puzzles. The result is a game that asks you to pay attention rather than to solve.

Ben Babbitt and The Bedquilt Ramblers

The soundtrack is an original electronic score by Ben Babbitt, paired with a suite of old hymns and bluegrass standards recorded by The Bedquilt Ramblers. That pairing is the game in miniature: old American music and a machine humming underneath it.

The art matches. Kentucky Route Zero renders its caves, highways and gas stations in a flat, stage-like style, with a bird’s-eye or isometric view that sometimes drops to a side view. It looks like a diorama. It looks like a memory of a place you have driven through but never stopped in.

The game runs on Linux, Android, PC, iOS and Mac. It is single player. It has been filed under point-and-click, adventure and indie, with themes of thriller and drama. Those labels are accurate and also useless. Kentucky Route Zero is a magical realist adventure about a secret highway and the mysterious folks who travel it, and no genre tag gets at that.

Seven Years, Five Acts

The structure is the story of the release as much as the story of the game. Five acts, out sporadically across seven years. The first arrived in January 2013. The last arrived in January 2020. A player who started at the beginning waited most of a decade to see how the delivery turned out.

Console ports for the Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One came under the subtitle “TV Edition,” timed to the final act. Android and iOS versions followed on December 13, 2022, in partnership with Netflix. PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S versions landed in August 2023.

That is a long tail for a game with no puzzles in it. It also tells you something about who kept playing. This is not a game that survives on mechanics. It survives on the fact that people wanted to know what happened to Conway.

KEY FACTS

• Score: 8.8/10 (IGDB critic aggregate, 10 outlets)
• Developer: Cardboard Computer (Jake Elliott, Tamas Kemenczy)
• First act: January 2013
• Final act: January 2020
• Mobile release: December 13, 2022, with Netflix
• Current-gen ports: August 2023 (PS5, Xbox Series X/S)
• Platforms: Linux, Android, PC (Microsoft Windows), iOS, Mac
• Modes: Single player

The Release Schedule

What the Waiting Cost

Seven years is a real cost, and it is the fairest thing to hold against Kentucky Route Zero. A story told in five pieces over that span asks a lot of anyone who wants to follow it. The gaps were long. The acts were sporadic. Players who came in late got the better deal, because they got the whole thing at once.

But the delay is also the least interesting thing about the game. What matters is that the last act landed, and that it landed well enough to put Kentucky Route Zero on several best-of-the-decade lists. Plenty of episodic games from that era never finished. This one did.

The other thing worth saying plainly: the game’s refusal of puzzles is not a limitation. It is the design. Cardboard Computer took the point-and-click framework — the one built by Monkey Island and King’s Quest, later carried forward by Telltale’s Walking Dead series — and kept the clicking while dropping the challenge. What is left is a game where the only thing you can do wrong is not to care.

That is a risky bet. It works here because the writing holds up and because the atmosphere does the work that puzzles usually do. You keep moving through the caves and the gas stations because you want to see the next room, not because a lock is blocking you.

Why 8.8 Holds Up

Kentucky Route Zero is one of the few games of its era that earns the word literary without flinching from it. The visual art is distinctive. The narrative is patient. The characterization is the point, and the themes — work, debt, the people left behind by the places they live in — are handled with a restraint most games never attempt.

It is not for everyone. If you need a game to push back, this one will not. It will let you walk Conway to the next stop and ask you to listen. That is the entire offer, and it is a good one.

The score is 8.8 out of 10, matching the IGDB critic aggregate across 10 outlets. That number feels right. Kentucky Route Zero is not flawless — the release schedule alone cost it something — but it is the kind of work that gets better the longer you sit with it, which is exactly what seven years of acts asked of the people who stayed.

If you have not played it, the whole thing is available now. Start at the beginning and do not rush it. Conway is still trying to make that delivery.

Cardboard Computer · game review · Indie Games · Kentucky Route Zero · magical realism · point-and-click