12/4/2023 0 Comments Kentucky route zero music![]() Not only did the developers use the words “magical realism,” a literary genre I barely knew (yet was convinced I loved), they also described the game as a “slow-paced” adventure, “focusing on exploring new environments and talking with new people.” Though the game looks much different than in its original Kickstarter video, many of the basics laid out in the campaign remain the same: Kentucky Route Zero follows the journey of Conway, an antique deliveryman who would travel the roads (visible and invisible) of Kentucky, meet some memorable friends, and make one last delivery before his employer shut down shop. Which was a bummer, because Cardboard Computer’s pitch was laser targeted at me. Which meant that not only was the high price of fixing a chipped tooth ( yes, even in Canada) out of my range, even Kentucky Route Zero’s original, $40 Kickstarter ask wasn’t something I could easily fit into my budget. (“Although it is named the ‘universal numbering system,’” Wikipedia tells me, “it is also called the ‘American system’ as it is only used in the United States.” Hmm.)įrom late 2010 until mid 2015, I was living in Canada, attending the University of Western Ontario’s Media Studies program, and making something like $15k a year as teaching assistant plus, eventually, some extra cash from freelance writing. In what might seem like an unrelated thread, but which, I promise, has deep relevance to Kentucky Route Zero, this was also about the time I fell down the stairs of the townhouse I rented a tiny room in, chipping my right permanent mandibular first molar, tooth #30 per the Universal Numbering System. ![]() After all, it only raised $8,583, and I’d been taught that budget and quality were, if not causal, at least correlative. So when Cardboard Computer launched the Kickstarter for the game on January 7, 2011-a full year before the massive, multi-million dollar Double Fine Adventure and Wasteland 2 campaigns ushered in crowdfunding as a common fixture of gaming in the 2010s-maybe I just didn’t expect much from something so humble. I was certainly a simpler (if still well-intentioned) critic. ![]() It would be facile to say that 2011 was a simpler time (whether for video games or for the world), but I think it is fair to say that for many, it seemed simpler. Maybe I didn’t see it because the landscape was so different. Instead, it’s probably more fair to say that Kentucky Route Zero is a game about what capitalism does to people, how it turns them into fuel and into highway both, so that it can spread further and further, devouring more and more along the way. Or, that’s not right, exactly, because there are many elements of capitalism that are absent from the game-the rich people which last year’s Disco Elysium skewer loudly, directly, and repeatedly, for example, barely appear in KRZ. ![]() In retrospect I don’t know how I didn’t see that Kentucky Route Zero would be a game fundamentally about capitalism. ![]()
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