PC User Reviews

Personally I don't get why this so critically acclaimed. It's not really a game at all. It's a visual novel with some point and click aspects. The plot isn't that great, doesn't go anywhere or have much of a coherent story. Yes you could spend about an hour thinking about the meaning of it afterwards, but that's not really what gaming is about. The devs behind the game are art students, who were clearly more interested in making something that should be an arthouse film than a game. It's not unplayable or the worst thing out there but I just don't get the critics who believe this is the best thing ever.

If the art relies too much on the viewer to interpret its meaning, it is too subjective, therefore becomes empty and shallow.

First off, this is not a game. It's an interactive novel. There is no skill, or luck, or strategy. There's certainly no goals to achieve — which is very much the point. This is a story about people whose lives have been deprived of purpose by the corporate takeover and deindustrialization of the rural American south. It's a southern Gothic magic realist ghost story in which the characters do find a semblance of meaning and community in their broken lives, but not in the ways they expect. I think the experience is enhanced if you go in knowing that Conway will never make that delivery which is the game's inciting incident, that none of the characters will find what they are nominally looking for, and that relationships and authenticity matter far, far more than extrinsic goals. Video games are often fantasies of control but this is very much a story about finding meaning in a world that we cannot control, a world that has left us behind. It didn't totally work for me; I found it a bit too surreal and elliptical to be really emotionally resonant. The sudden shifts of setting and the introductions of whole new casts of characters from one chapter to the next threw me off. But the world that it conjures still lingers in my memory three years later and I might even replay it one day.

Inconsequential, drab, and unsubstantial story that hopes people will misread its disorganized ramblings as something deeper that it is.

I can't say that I understand all the hype about this game. For being an interactive narrative ("walking simulator"), there's no coherent plot to speak of, and the vast majority of it is stream-of-consciousness rambling that makes no sense at all. Along the journey of these poorly-established characters, expect to deal with scenes revolving around the life cycles of bats, extinct Pueblo peoples, whiskey factories, feral horses, incomplete text-based video games, arcane phone help lines, a modern art exhibit, an incredibly long and boring scene from a play, a small restaurant's unusual menu, and more. None of it connects to anything. None of it makes sense. The "story" has no real ending, the characters have no real resolution. Your choices are, of course, meaningless. Even the art is crude and low-poly. There's some good voice acting, though. If you're into trippy art experiments that you have to work to find meaning in, you may enjoy this. I did not.

Who ever says the game is boring, then this is not for you. I guess this isn't your tastes in game. The game is a journey. A journey which we create ourselves. People with the taste for a minimalist story telling will enjoy it. If you want something else, buy that rather than berating all the negativity which you couldn't enjoy. The game has its beauty. If you don't like it, don't buy it then.

Choices don't matter, there are no mechanics that make it a 'game', and the characters are mostly boring and uninteresting. Most of the early reviews really loved the first two Acts, but the only thing that they had going for them was that they were short. The first thing that I would call a plot point doesn't happen until chapter 3, and even then is pretty weak. Ugh. I finished this game, and regret wasting my time. Watch the Zero Punctuation review, I did after I played it, and my feelings were aptly summed up there. Avoid.

An absolute slog to get through and way too artsy for me. I would rather read a good book. While I understood most of the themes the characters did not do it for me. You really have to be in synch with the writers to get something out of this and I clearly wasn't.

metacritic wont update my score unless i type something out apparently. Very annoying. The game is also overrated, go read books.

Ultimately, a waste of time. Incoherent. boring. wall-of-text red herring ramblings with minimal playability or plot. Suffered through it only to find out nothing got solved in the end. Avoid if you like games.

[SPOILER ALERT: This review contains spoilers.]

This is more of a semi-interactive cartoon than an adventure game. There's nothing to solve, the texts go on forever, dialogs are more often than not just boring and/or plain absurd and the story is apparently envisioned as a Twin Peaks meets Inside but falls far short of both aforementioned franchises respectively. What is it about? Everything and nothing. There's no real plot. It's just as if the creators had no real script and were making it all up as they went along. Or better: as if they put their weird dreams on the paper and turned that confusion and nonsense into a motion picture which they then improperly christened as "the game". The execution of such surreal ideas really puts developers' immaturity into perspective. The product is nice-looking, the atmosphere is captivating but is wasted on the very basic interaction with it and , for most of the time, lines and lines of pointless and off-putting text. I suppose the game works better if you're high. In other case, however, I cannot recommend it.

nice and good game!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Starts of great with the atmosphere and suggestion of possibilities and sense of mystery. However it only gets more whimsical and "mysterious" until I definitely stopped caring. I would say it is worth playing until the performance in the bar. Of course if you get that far you won't be satisfied that nothing is resolved... but nothing won't be later either. It is a commendable game for doing something different

Kentucky Route Zero is a boring animated comic book. Although the graphic design is appealing, the most interesting thing in the story is to discuss with the dog Homer... Nothing to solve and the interaction is basic.

I can't recommend this as a game because it's more of an animated comic book. And I'm also not too impressed by the comic that is slowly unfolding. While I love the visuals and the atmosphere, both seemed increasingly wasted. Wasted on yet another narrative that is very keen to dazzle me by playing hide and seek, being oh so intricate and filled with heavy metaphors that it will find it's usual audience among the easily impressed. And while there might be an actual Jesus on this toast that some can see while most people only pretend to spot him, I stopped being intrigued to find whatever Cardboard Computer was burying with their equally sophisticated, but mundane dialogue and plot. There are no actual conversations, only people monologuing in turns, and most of the time I get the feeling that I'm listening to the writer trying to figure out what the hell is going on and where all of this is going, just like the reader. There are however a lot of beautiful moments to be found, and even when I'd given up on the story itself, entering a new scene was always exciting because of the visuals. I'd recommend it for the art, if nothing else, so if you are looking at some screenshots of the game and don't feel at least a little enchanted, you should give this one a pass.

Jugados dos primeros actos e interludio. No puedo continuar, siento que estoy perdiendo el tiempo. Mientras que el estilo me gusta, la interacción me resulta tediosa e inútil. La historia no existe y lo poco que te cuenta lo tienes que interpretar sin mucha ayuda. Leí y escuché reviews que hablaban de obra maestra que era para todo el mundo y sinceramente me cuesta pensar quién podría disfrutarlo, yo personalmente no.

Playing Kentucky Route Zero makes me feel like I'm back in high school reading a book no human actually wants to read and I'm expected to write an essay afterwards on the actual meaning. In this case I'm not so sure there is a deeper meaning. Kentucky Route Zero stays intriguing after the first chapter, falls off a bit during the second and third chapters then quickly loses any semblance of a coherent story. If I hadn't known it was such a short game I would have abandoned it after the first couple of hours. As it was, I struggled to have the desire to finish it. Date Completed: 2020-02-27 Playtime: 7h (feel asleep while playing a few times) Enjoyment: 1/10 Recommendation: Please, no, don't.

the whole act together is quite strange and if you dont like too much abstract concepts then this game is not really for you. the second to third acts are all very surreal and strange specially when you reach the end of an abandoned mine with people and a funky computer living in it. till the end of act iv till act v which is a lot more than other acts combined together the story unveils and you are still left wondering what went on about. a good game with a rather weird story but worth it.

I had first heard about this quirky game called Kentucky Route Zero a couple years after the first episode came out. I don’t like playing my games spread out like that so I decided to wait until the whole game was finished and to binge it then. Luckily I got the game for a good price in the mean time and years later I was able to complete it from start to finish without waiting. One thing I am not too worried about is spoiling the plot to Kentucky Route Zero because truth be told I’m not sure I really know what it is. Do you like games that make sense ? Well this one doesn’t. That may sound like a slur or insult but I look at this game as the closest thing to a video game made by David Lynch or David Chronenberg as I have ever played. I may have not always understood why what was happening was happening but I couldn’t look away and was immersed all the same. The characters are interesting, the locations full of lore and detail; the soundtrack awesome; and the story so odd that I am almost glad the strangest bits went without explanation because it may have ruined it. You begin the game as a delivery man who is trying to find an address he has never heard of. He gets pointed to a route called the “Route Zero” and directions to someone who can guide him to it. From there begins the strange journey where you will slowly add more and more people to your group all with their own stories to be told. In travelling this mystical route you will fly on the back of an eagle; find an underground computer to play a video game within a video game that is kept by people who have a giant fire they keep going; discover some of the most realistic government buracracy I have seen and much much more. At different points of the story you will have dialogue options in terms of not just what you say but who says it. You can kind of tailor the story based on who you want to follow and interact with although I am not sure just how much control over things this gives you or how it branches the main story. The game is like a combo of a 2D adventure game and a visual novel. You take control of different characters at different times depending on the parts of the story. There are no puzzles to solve; no enemies to defeat; I am sure some will say no real “gameplay”. I’m sure that there are those out there that will appreciate the game for what it is: a wild ride that has a very entertaining plot. The graphics are a weird mix of a low detail with a good art style. The audio to the game is great, the soundtrack setting the mood very well. There is no voice acting aside from a couple parts where you’re watching video or listening to answering machine messages but I didn’t mind this. I played Kentucky Route Zero on Linux. It never crashed on me once. There was one bug where when you are playing as a cat going around listening to peoples stories and meowing at them to get more details I had to check out a hole and the cat wouldn’t exit the hole making me reload the scene after which the cat would exit. Yes you play as a cat in one part, told you this game was odd. There were no graphics options at all to tinker with aside from choosing “modern or classic”. That simply ages the game back to the pixel era or keeps a more modern style. Alt-Tab didn’t work. The game doesn’t have a manual save option. It seemed to auto save at the end of each scene. There are three save slots but only one per playthrough so three people can be playing their own seperate saves but you can’t have more than one save slot for your game. During play the game used 14-85% of my GPU; 391-413MB of VRAM; 18-22% of my CPU; and 1.8-2.2GB of RAM. The game used up 2GB of disk space. Kentucky Route Zero was an experience I won’t soon forget. If you enjoy TV shows like Twin Peaks; movies like Videodrome; or games like Oxenfree or Night in the Woods then you will probably enjoy this. There were points that were a little slow paced but overall the game started strong and ended strong. It kept me wanting to know more and to know what the game would introduce next which is something many games these days fail to achieve. My Score: 8/10 My Sytem: AMD Ryzen 5 2600X | 16GB DDR4-3000 CL15 | MSI RX 580 8GB Gaming X | Mesa 19.3.3 | Samsung 850 Evo 250GB | Manjaro 18.1.5 | Mate 1.22.3 | Kernel 5.5.2-1-MANJARO

Very special, dreamlike and artful game centered around dialogue. You choose what your character says, but pretty quickly it becomes apparent that your choices does not affect the game outcome in any shape or form. The only thing you really choose is your own poetry, your own inner narrative. You have no control over where the game takes you. I found this absolutely fascinating and thought it elevated the game to greater heights. It's beautifully done. This game is for dreamers enjoying a mystery that maybe never will make sense.

If reading is really nessecary then I'll read some books rather than getting blinded by this boring nonesence. I don't see any future for this bla bla.

Incredible waltz into an eerie world of magical realism. A game of tremendous atmosphere and almost theatrical set design. The scene when Junebug begins his set in the dive bar is one of my most treasured moments in gaming. KRZ is not a game for button mashers, but for for players who want a thoughtful, compelling experience.

Even though I have only played the first two acts, I have to say that Kentucky Route Zero is one of the most wonderful gaming experiences I've ever had. Apparently a point-and-click graphic adventure, this is actually much closer to an interactive graphic novel. It's really good literature, or art, or however you may categorize it. Obviously, though, the "game" dimension is only the method used to put the player in the middle of the story. The difficulty is trivial, and it consists merely in finding the way through the different locations on the map and sorting out the meaning of the quest, which is but an excuse for a compelling story about lonliness, frailty and oblivion. Now, about the script: it's more than excellent, it's really over the scale. Whoever has written the texts in this game has obviously read a lot and written a lot, and knows who Don Delillo or Faulkner are. Very often the choice of dialogues does not have any consequence on the development of the story --- it's just meant to let the player co-author the story, add and choose the details that frame the main characters. You won't like this game if you're looking for shiny entertainment and action, for real-time emotions where you can prove your gaming stamina. You will love this game if you enjoy art, design, reading a good story, and obviously if adventure games were your favorite genre. It's very hard to explain how fabulously original, simple, light and complex is the graphic aspect of this game. The map interface is a great idea and the medium by which minigames find their right place into the game, creating a spiraling sensation that destroys the common notion of space as the story approaches the zero. Slowly, also the environments lose features of reality and represent in a fascinating way the tricks of immagination, irrationality, oblivion and selflessness. Just play the game, you won't ever forget it. Especially if you like good literature and contemporary art & design!