I've only played the first act of Kentucky Route Zero (opens in new tab). I liked it an awful lot—I raved about it in a review you might still find floating around out there somewhere—but I don't like episodic releases, and so after it was finished I decided to put the whole thing aside until I could play it all in one big, bizarre narrative hallucination. I did not expect to have to wait seven years, but here we are in 2020, and Cardboard Computer has now, finally, announced that the fifth and final act will be out on January 28.
Kentucky Route Zero is a slow, dreamlike amble through the magical back roads of the titular state, where some things happen and some things don't, and sometimes it's hard to tell the difference. It's remarkably immersive—I could almost feel the humidity of the sultry summer night in act 1—and spins its tale slowly, so that you might not notice the shift from "strange" to "surreal" as you and your dog attempt to deliver a piece of antique furniture to an address that nobody is sure actually exists.
"There are no explicit puzzles here—except for the meaning of the things you experience along the way or riddles proffered by your occasional companions," we wrote in our 84% review (opens in new tab). "Characters fade from reality like apparitions, a radio booms out choral music in a deserted church, a burning tree marks a turning along the highway, and an old tannoy pings the depths of a disused mine, stirring memories of a forgotten disaster."
Kentucky Route Zero is available on Steam (opens in new tab), GOG (opens in new tab), Humble (opens in new tab), and Itch.io (opens in new tab). If you'd like to get a sense of what it's all about, sort of, Un Pueblo de Nada (opens in new tab) is a production of the fictional Echo River community, funded in part by a court-ordered grant from the Consolidated Power Company—a demo of sorts.
