Kentucky Route Zero

Adventure games have always been for me the best genre (alhouth I despise this awful need of always putting inside classifications) of video games. A brief description of what constitutes an adventure game is the strong influence of a narrative being more important than gameplay, in ways this is why this genre is usually connected with a point&click gameplay.

Anyways, I’ve been playing adventure games since I first found a copy of The Dig– a George Lucas script that being impossible to fund at the time became an adventure game. At the time I was around 12 years old and it took me well over a year to finish the game.

What made me like so much adventure games is because for me it seems like an interactive movie. Usually there are no ways you can die and the whole idea is figuring the puzzles, finding the items and talking to characthers to progress the narrative. Some of the dozens of games left a long lasting relation with the characters – from comic adventures like the Monkey Island series, Grim Fandango, Full Throttle, Sam & Max to the thriller and sci-fi Beneath a Steel Sky, Dreamfall and Gemini Rue just to name a few. For whoever is interested I also strongly recommend trying out the Syberia series from Benoît Sokal.

I always keep an eye on Adventure Gamers website to find out the newest releases and about 3 years ago I read about an upcoming game called Kentucky Route Zero– a magical realist adventure game about a secret highway in the caves beneath Kentucky, and the mysterious folks who travel it.

From the intial trailer that only had a one minute of gameplay I imeditally falled in love. The ambience reminded me of a David Lynch movie in a cell shaded 2d video game. As the game is divided in five chapters until now only the first three were released and I found one of the most beautiful scenes that I ever saw while playing.

With my truck broken down in the middle of the underground Route Zero in the middle of the night a couple on a motorcycle passed by and offered to help us out if we agreed to watch there show in a nearby bar. I agreed with them and when arriving at the bar we see that it is almost closing and that the public had all left.

Even so the manager agrees to let the couple (called Junebug) sing for the shear joy of bringing music to his ears, although he won’t be paying for their perfomance. What happens next is what follows in the video.

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