The Dismantled Book of ‘Kentucky Route Zero’
When I opened Kentucky Route Zero I had no expectations or understanding for what it was going to get me to think about. After playing, I was inundated with thoughts surrounding how character dialogue and a setting’s context can adjust the narrative’s mood and tone, not to mention the homages to many southern gothic writers, like William Faulkner and Ambrose Bierce. For the most part, video games typically get me to think about finding cover, strategizing fire fights, or black and white moral choices. Kentucky Route Zero (KRZ) broke this tradition. It has shown me video games are now narrative experiences using story as the main purpose to play the game. Most notable in videos games making this shift is how many narrative focused games have lined the shelves of digital libraries and game stores. Kentucky Route Zero is one brilliant example of games pushing at the boundaries of how we not only define video games, but how we define literature.
Kentucky Route Zero plays more like a dismantled, digitized novel than a game. The closest I can think of what I mean by a dismantled novel is William Faulkners’ The Sound and Fury. In short, Faulkner walks you through a dysfunctional family and explores the complexities of each family member through a shattered sequence of events by hiding the fragments in different characters. Similar to this, Kentucky Route Zero doles out a structure where each character have specific qualities in how they engage the story. Not only does Kentucky Route Zero fragment a complex story into different character perspectives, but it laces its narrative with magical realism. This is most similar to Ambrose Bierce’s writings where bizarre otherworldly things happen in a very normal everyday world.
The fractured, complex, and magical realism narrative in Kentucky Route Zero is also exceptional in the sense you don’t win. In most games the point is to win, yet in Kentucky Route Zero there isn’t a way to win, there is only completing a story. This completion is similar to finishing a book and much of Kentucky Route Zero reads as if it is a book. Don’t get me wrong, Kentucky Route Zero is a game; it isn’t a digitized novel or graphic novel, yet the feeling that you’re completing a story is so powerful. It is akin to being able to visually and aurally interact with a book’s story.
From the opening scene the story beckons you into the mysterious and southern gothic world of Kentucky Route Zero. It details a man named Conway who delivers for an antique store. His travels begin at Equus Oils gas station. When Conway pulls into the station he is met with a darkened building backlit by a setting sun along with a massive horse head mounted on top of the station. The scene itself has magnificent contrast between dark and light and a vibrating potential to hold the beginnings of a coiled mystery. In the background Route 65 rushes cars past adding to the aural texture and detail of a game that is focused on traveling and driving. That the initial scene begins with a gas station firmly plants the idea of cars and movement as a central theme to the game. Gas stations signify passing through and transience, yet the presence of this gas station and the weight given to the station by the darkened windows and the anchoring horse head impress the weightiness of the opening scene. The weighty image of the gas station fashions it as a fixture in the world, an anchor for how the story begins. As Conway’s truck idles gently in the background, you’re invited to move him towards the front of Equus Oils. When Conway reaches the gas station’s front, he meets a man named Joseph. Joseph is positioned in a Queen Anne’s chair enveloped in shadows. As Conway moves towards him, Joseph blooms into light from an old-fuel lantern. Dialogue choices come up and you find out the gas station is out of commission due to a faulty generator. As Conway figures out how to fix the generator, Joseph begins reciting poetry. Joseph then queries Conway to fill in sections of the poem. The scene that blossoms out from this interaction juxtaposes the blunt machine noise and the harshness of working with machines to the calm and smooth words of poetry from Joseph. These first few scenes set the tone of the game as a story that wants to develop outwards from the characters.
With how the dialogue explores characters’ personalities, the movement expresses something about each character. The movement in the game deserves special attention. When you click to move Conway a horseshoe lands at the spot where you click. This is not a cute gimmick or a random choice by the developers – the symbol of horseshoes is bound into southern culture and especially in Kentucky where racing horses is deeply integrated into the state’s ethnology. Conway epitomizes the thoughtful southern man; the horseshoe helps stress this point. Movements, both visually and aurally, become motifs that help explain and express character traits. Each person gets special attention to how they move, some aurally, others visually. Shannon, for example, sways and moves slowly when she walks. Junebug moves mechanically with robotic noises. Ezra skips. Each characters’ movement comments on who they are and what they are. This is seen in how their dialogue mirrors the style of their movement as well, Shannon is methodological and thoughtful when she speaks. Junebug is spunky and energetic, coming to quick, joke-filled conclusions. Erza is wistful and eclectic, his dialogue usually wanders away from the main conversation. As the story unravels, the characters’ movements help bolster their personalities, commenting on their complexity as individuals. The movements make sure to leave a ton of implication up to you to unpack about the characters.
Packing all of these storytelling elements into games is still new to how video games tell stories. Games that contain narratives similar to what Kentucky Route Zero boasts are mostly jammed in between the pulls of a trigger rather than utilizing them as a driving force. Kentucky Route Zero takes narrative and pushes it into the forefront where the game is able to explore and expound on what the narrative is attempting to convey. Through its adherence to story, Kentucky Route Zero manages to capture and show off many narratives tools within its meandering and mysterious narrative similar to William Faulkner’s meandering and at times dizzying perusal of perspectives and personalities in The Sound and Fury. Conway shares the story between many companions, Shannon, Junebug, Ezra and more. They all take turns adding to the story through dialogue options the player chooses. As you come across dialogue options each character has unique things to say which change and add to the story. In the end, the choices don’t change what happens all that much, yet the choices do take on an important task: they change your perception of the story and its outcome.
In how Kentucky Route Zero shapes your perspective of the story through different characters’ dialogue options is where the game’s fractured storyline mirrors what Faulkner did with The Sound and Fury. Not only is the storytelling similar between the two, but the setting Kentucky Route Zero places Conway in is route 65, a major highway in Kentucky. This is similar to Faulkner’s setting as well where homes dot the countryside along main thoroughfares.
Both stories also exude a gothic southern style of storytelling with dark happenings occurring in their narratives, all while exploring the psychological profiles of the characters. Faulkner spent time delving into his characters and pulling out their thoughts and feelings, getting the story to shape and reshape their being. The characters in Kentucky Route Zero get the same treatment, though with them, their reshaping is visible since you see how their dialogue options frame the story into different interpretative chunks. Authors who use this style to write stories are taking a risk. It is tough to explore characters so thoroughly in a story as both Kentucky Route Zero and Faulkner do.
That riskiness occurs due to an author’s attempt to capture the human condition and all the contradictory pieces that are contained in our thinking and beliefs. This makes for an easily unmanageable and chaotic read or play. To implement this well, an author positions their story so that characters act as the main driving force for narrative movement while the plot remains tucked away, revealed only by characters thinking and experiencing. The next part is in dividing the plot between multiple perspectives, allowing the reader to construct the story from the many perspectives. Those are tell-tale ways to create a mystery. In essence, give the audience too much information and don’t show how it all connects and suddenly you have a mystery to unravel and interpret.
Kentucky Route Zero, at its heart, is a mystery. A visually and aurally gorgeous narrative that allows a player to piece together a sprawling narrative into understandable chunks while never truly revealing what it’s really about.
Preston Johnston is the co-host of the Ludonarrative Podcast, which airs at the beginning of each month and is available on iTunes. If you want to find more of Preston’s writing, check back on Mondays where his essays on games as literature and ludonarrative can be found. Furthermore, if you appreciate Epilogue Gaming’s work and would like to support it, you can subscribe for as little as $1 a month on our Patreon page.
