Nintendo Switch Critic Reviews

What I can say, is that Kentucky Route Zero is a beautiful game. It is also a tragic game, a boring game, and perhaps not even a game at all.

Kentucky Route Zero: TV Edition is an overall landmark effort in the realm of video games. It explores various facets of the medium’s abilities with storytelling and evocatively shifts its gameplay and gorgeous visuals to keep things interesting. Paying dividends if you decide to input your own personality, it’s a work of art that I can’t recommend enough.

Kentucky Route Zero is a brilliantly told story that takes chances, and unapologetically is what it is. Sounds suspiciously like art to me. Damn good art.

Kentucky Route Zero is a fascinating story with a thick atmosphere and themes which will leave you thinking long after playing each act. It's one of the best stories I've ever played or read in a video game, and I implore everyone to play it. Kentucky Route Zero is something special.

Overall Kentucky Route Zero may not be for everybody, but those for whom it is for will find it an incredibly well put together experience. The dark and mysterious atmosphere and memorable locations mixed with well written and human feeling characters make this game something that players who value a narrative focused experience won’t soon forget. It’s a story about looking for that which you’ve lost, and maybe finding some new stuff along the way, whether you really mean to be doing so or not. Those looking for a challenge or something a bit more action packed won’t find what they’re looking for here, but those looking for a surreal and mysterious tale will have come to the right place.

Kentucky Route Zero takes place in your head just as often as on the screen. Not only the story is vague; everything is vague. Developer Cardboard Computer apparently knows exactly how graphics, sound and storytelling can support your imagination. Goosebumps. David Lynch would be proud of it.

Kentucky Route Zero: TV Edition is the full and complete Kentucky Route Zero experience. A magical realist point-and-click adventure that takes you on a beguiling journey to a place that exists both below and beyond. It's a trip to be savoured, ruminated on; no need to rush. Each act here brings with it some new perspective, new places and people to forge deep connections with. You may be confused, even bewildered by your initial steps down into the subterranea that exists somewhere beneath this version of Kentucky but, by the end of your journey, you'll have made friends and memories and been escorted through a rich and beautiful experience that will stay with you much longer than you may expect.

At the end of a tumultuous decade, it’s only natural to reflect on the years gone by. And here comes a great game to cap the previous decade—and signal the start of something new. If I hadn’t already spent the last several years being told that Kentucky Route Zero was a special game, I’d have known it immediately.

As the video game industry experienced tumultuous change in the last decade, Kentucky Route Zero has felt like an anomaly, unconcerned with industry trends. Even as an episodic game, developer Cardboard Computer took years at a time to release acts — something most episodic titles try to avoid. It’s like Kentucky Route Zero was rejecting every rule, doing things its own way. Through that, it became one of the most important experimental games ever, establishing itself as a major player in the discourse of whether games are art. Kentucky Route Zero screams an emphatic and stubborn “yes” to that question.

It should be said that Act V ends not with a bang, not with a whimper, but with the kind of deep sigh you hear from working folks at five o'clock on a Friday after a hard week.