94 PCWorld MARCH 2020REVIEWS KENTUCKY ROUTE ZERO
that’s not entirely correct, as Kentucky Route
Zero soon expands to multiple characters with
multiple viewpoints, and you’re often
controlling both parts of a back-and-forth
conversation. You’re the writer, the director,
the actors, all of it.
The entire undertaking is sprawling and
unwieldy and messy and disjointed, and in some
way I think that’s why it’s successful. It’s unlikely
that every part of Kentucky Route Zero will
resonate with every person, but you’re almost
guaranteed to find something to latch onto.
It’s about found family and lost family, the
burdens of capitalism and the ways we define
ourselves by our work, the slow decline of rural
America but also the mythology around it,
self-determination versus community,
gentrification, the small rituals we perform daily.
And sometimes it’s about none of that.
Kentucky Route Zero rewards picking apart its
every scene, but it’s also a joy to simply existwithin its world.
On that level, it’s a
surreal road trip
about a non-
Euclidean highway
and TV repairs and
two android
musicians and a
museum filled with
houses. It’s a
young boy and his
big brother, an
eagle, and the
flights they take together nightly. It’s an
impossible forest, a captivating visual reference
to Magritte’s painting “The Blank Signature.” It’s
an underground lake and the restaurant that
floats in the middle, serving up strange creatures
to its loyal patrons. It’s a telephone hotline that
says “For the monument to something that we
don’t remember, press three.”
And sometimes it’s a 40-minute theater
production, an homage to Waiting for Godot
that you sit and watch in real-time. Sit, watch,
and do nothing—except you’re a participant
in the play, and your role is to do nothing, so
really you’re an actor...right?
Kentucky Route Zero is a weird and
wonderful experiment that I find almost
impossible to write about in its fullest sense.
Instead, certain sequences keep playing out
in my head.
One in particular has stuck with me. Towards
the end of Act IV you find yourself in what used to