In German novelist and playwright Gustav Freytag’s book, “Technique of the Drama,” he defines the fifth and final act of a play as the “catastrophe.”
“The catastrophe of the drama is the closing action…the warning must be given here, that the poet should not allow himself to be misled by modern tender-heartedness, to spare the life of his hero on the stage.”
Kentucky Route Zero is a video game structured in five acts. It does not spare the life of its hero on the stage.
The game is a critique of capitalism, a critique of the Trump administration and the housing crisis, and after playing through Act V, it’s clear that Kentucky Route Zero is also a game about cyclicality, endings, and goodbyes. Despite its stylization, it’s a game about real life.
Developed by Cardboard Computer, the game was released act by act starting in 2013. The long-awaited Act V was released on January 28, 2020 (the developers had originally planned for an early 2018 release). The indie game was a sleeper hit – it’s been winning awards since the first act was released seven years ago, starting with awards from the Independent Games Festival and Indiecade. Most recently, it was named Polygon’s 4th best game of the decade and has been covered in the LA Times.
It’s a point-and-click game that feels like moving through a play (in one of the game’s “interludes,” – shorter playable experiences released between full acts – you even play as an unnamed actor in an immersive play.) Dialogue and descriptions in game are styled like a script with stage directions and asides. The soundscape is rich, the soundtrack alternates between atmospheric electronic music and folksy bluegrass hymns. It’s a stylized, magical realist, southern gothic experience.
Kentucky Route Zero is ostensibly about Conway, a worn-down driver. He and his dog are the first characters we meet. He stops his truck at Equus Oils, a gas station, to get directions to “5 Dogwood Drive.” He’s a delivery man for an antique store. They stand under a giant horse head on the station’s sign. We learn that 5 Dogwood Drive isn’t really a place that…exists, per se. Conway has to drive along “the Zero” – a circular, underground, otherworldly highway that’s ever shifting and difficult to locate. Time and space aren’t fixed in Kentucky Route Zero. Characters are somehow in two places at once, or disappear before our eyes, perhaps most clearly illustrated by Emily, Bob, and Ben — a ghostly trio of folk singers who act almost like a Greek chorus. They never fully interact with the other characters, but often float by singing hymns, or playing tabletop games in basements only to vanish without a trace. These explorations of liminal space and overlaps in time occur consistently throughout the game. It’s a narrative choice that goes beyond creating a spooky atmosphere — oddly enough it makes the game feel like real life. Places have history: for the most part, someone has always come before you and someone will always come after.
As Conway drives, the cast of characters expands, technology starts acting up, the locations get more untethered from reality. An office building has a floor occupied entirely by bears and there’s a distillery staffed by skeletons with debts to pay off. No one we meet is perturbed by this: it’s just how the world works.
Conway disappears at the end of Act IV. He has a debt to settle. The last time we see him, he’s in a boat full of skeletons, heading down a dark river. Everyone else has to move forward without the man who brought them together on their journeys.
Unlike the other acts, which are broken up into multiple scenes and settings, Act V takes place in one location, a continuous scene.
At the top of Act V, the ensemble of characters gathers in a ghost town. The town has just been through a massive flood after a storm. The town’s only two horses are dead. The town is full of ghosts that appear as shadowy figures. The remaining townspeople know them. Sometimes the shadowy figures become solid again, take their human forms. Time is confusing and non-linear here too. The interlude released between acts IV and V, “Un Pueblo de Nada,” took place in this town, in a local TV station. That interlude ends with the station flooding, and the stations’ inhabitants – including some of the characters we interact with in Act V – presumably dying.
You play this act by controlling a cat that can run up to characters, overhear their interactions. The cat runs up to ghosts, and slips into their memories, sees who they were, what they did here. The gameplay map for this town is circular. With each pass the cat makes around the circle, time passes, the sun moves in the sky, the scene shifts. Characters appear to be in two places at once. A ghost is a shadowy figure one moment, a seemingly alive human person the next.
Act V feels like an epilogue. It answers some questions and raises others. It’s unclear what’s real and what’s not, who’s alive and who isn’t, what the future holds for our travelers and ghosts. But they’re done traveling, for now.
Shannon Márquez, the first character to join Conway on his drive along the Zero, sees that the mailbox to a house that’s entirely empty and is barely even a house reads “5 Dogwood Drive.” Conway is gone, but his last delivery finally arrived.
And so did everyone who traveled with Conway in the seven years since Kentucky Route Zero’s beginning. Junebug, the cyborg musician, and her partner Johnny. Ezra, the little boy whose brother is a giant eagle. Emily, Bob, and Ben, the trio of folk singers, are here too. They gather in front of a barn, beneath a painting of two horses, in front of the grave of the two horses that drowned. Another goodbye, another memorial. The shadowy ghosts appear around them, filling the screen. Emily sings, and when she’s done, the ghosts dissipate, and our characters process offscreen.
Some of them will leave in the morning, some will stay here and try to rebuild after the flood, try to make this town a home.
But we know how the story goes. An ending is never really final.
Some characters sit in the – now furnished – structure at 5 Dogwood Drive as the sun sets. When the night fades to black, we’re returned to the menu select screen. It’s circular. The end isn’t really an end. Act V leads right back to Act I. We’re back where we began, though the journey has changed us.
The “hero’s journey” is circular too. The hero traditionally ends where they began, but changed by what they’ve been through. The five act play may end, but the hero’s journey is constantly beginning anew. Kentucky Route Zero blends the two traditions to create a wistful, thoughtful meditation on what it means to journey, to arrive, to start over.
Act V of Kentucky Route Zero leaves us with more ghosts than answers, leaves us with only the hope and the melancholy that come with starting the cycle again. I couldn’t have asked for a better goodbye.
Kentucky Route Zero is a game by Cardboard Computer. Original electronic score by Ben Babbitt, hymns and bluegrass standards recorded by The Bedquilt Ramblers. All five acts and interludes are now available as “Kentucky Route Zero: PC Edition” for Windows, Linux, MacOS; or as “Kentucky Route Zero: TV Edition” (in partnership with Annapurna Interactive) for Nintendo Switch, PlayStation, and Xbox One.