Here we have a critically acclaimed point-and-click adventure game from Cardboard Computer. The indie team is in Chicago and launched Kentucky Route Zero in 2020.
It’s available on most consoles and PC. Offering a heaping load of magical realism, some great art direction, and lots of mysteries, this one if a fine effort in the adventure game genre. Woof.
A Modern Take on Ghost Stories in Kentucky Route Zero
Players take control of a truck driver called Conway. As a delivery man, you’re on a job to delivery a package to 5 Dogwood Drive.
As you tour along the famous Interstate 65 in Kentucky, your pet dog by your side, you find yourself becoming lost. Act I commences with a stop at a gas station called Epuus Oils where you soon find mysterious, ghostly apparitions and an unusual story ahead.
What then develops is funny, smart, surreal, and a little bit unusual.
Ostensibly a classic adventure game in structure, Cardboard Computer (in classic indie game fashion) subvert the genre by merging all manner of new things in. We’ve seen some reviews barely class it as a video game, more an experiment in narrative structure.
You play along and don’t face Game Over screens, traps, or much else other than curious characters on your way to the enigmatic 5 Dogwood Drive.
It’s one of those games you can just watch as if it was a TV series. With its striking visual style and atmospheric chillout vibes, it’s further proof of gaming’s unique narrative charms.
Initially, the game was released as Route Zero with just the one Act. That led to only a few hours of gameplay, but as there are now V Acts there’s around nine hours of gameplay time here.
As the series advanced, it became more dramatic and cinematic. As you can see with the Act V trailer.
If you love your adventure games then it’s definitely one to look into. Its experimental nature, however, does mean some gamers will likely be put off by it—it’s very different to what you’d class a traditional game.
Even in the point-and-click genre. Puzzles are sidelined for atmospherics and other ethereal goings on.
It’s a slow burner of a title. One we’ve dipped in and out of over the last six months before getting round to review it. We’ve revelled in its inventiveness, visual appeal, and clever little touches.
For us, it’s magnificent at its peaks. A glorious artistic marvel that oozes atmospherics and philosophical considerations. The occasional flaw aside, such as its very methodical pace, its well worth investing some time into its surprising depths.
The Sweeping Ambient Scope of Kentucky Route Zero’s Soundtrack
American composer Ben Babbitt is responsible for all the music across each Act. We really like this work here. It’s very ambient. To note, he also does scores for indie film projects.
Interestingly, Babitt doesn’t play modern games. After the Nintendo 64 era, he pretty much abandoned it all as a hobby to focus on his music career. He told Yahoo! Entertainment in 2020 the following:
“This game is really about telling the story, and music is always going to be a part of helping to do that in any medium. In making my own music, I’ve worked with narrative before. I mean any time you write a song, if there’s language and lyrics, then there’s a narrative element. But the difference is that [the narrative in a song is] not coming from an outside source, necessarily. It might be a reference to something, but [Kentucky Route Zero] was a full narrative world that had already been developed to a certain extent. Jake [Elliott] and Tamas [Kemenczy], the other collaborators on this project, really knew what the story was going to be about and had already mapped out the structure and locations and everything, so the music always had to be in reaction to those kinds of things. That evolved as we worked together for a long time, but in the beginning it was a lot of seeing what they did and reacting to it—even sometimes getting entire scenes to play through, react to, and write music for. Over time, we began working in tandem more, where I might be writing music just based on a conversation we had about a scene before we even started making it.”
The result is familiar, yet unfamiliar. If that makes sense. It’s the type of music so perfectly suited to adventure games, as we’ve heard in other modern classics such as Norco (2021).
Kind of neo-noir, jazzy, hints of synth, and all that jazz.
Considering atmospherics is such a vital part to Kentucky Route Zero, the score had to be spot on. Full credit to Babbitt as this work lends a lot of gravitas to the player’s adventuring.
