

Without a load of grief and wonder that you'll puzzle over for days, turning it over and over in your mind until it takes on the texture of a dream. There's no way you'll walk away unaffected. You will (depending on how you play) learn or not learn many things. You will, depending on how you play, see many signs and wonders. You will be a man, a woman, a boy, a cat, a dog, a bird and a ghost.
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Later, you will visit an art installation, see a barroom concert and a play, travel down a river to the ruin of a flooded town, suffer hallucinations, go into medical debt, get an electric skeleton leg, die (maybe), play some games, watch some TV (a lot of TV - including the final broadcast of a local public access TV station in a town wiped out by a flood which may stand as the single most affecting, haunting and strange sequence I have ever experienced in a game). If you look at them, they're wearing ink-jet cartridges and chains of paperclips as shells. When you walk back out again, there are crabs all over the ground.
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In KRZ, it is a floor full of bears mixed in among the clerks and receptionists that no one notices at all. Magical realism, on the page, is a tacit acceptance of the fundamental brokenness of reality (or, alternately, the mundanity of unreality) and the lack of commentary IS the commentary. Brilliant because the power of magical realism as a genre - the thing that makes it so spooky, so off-putting and able to get at the particular crawling dread of this modern century - is that every injection of the surreal, the impossible, the magical is treated the same way we'd treat the wind blowing or a lamp switching on. They watch you until, eventually, you leave. Their big bear heads turn as you move through the floor. You walk through them and they just watch you. Stop off on three and the bears do nothing. You (as Conway) are presented with a list of elevator buttons. A massive government edifice existing inside a former cathedral (complete with pipe organ), it is full of clerks and files cabinets, paperwork and crabs. My favorite joke in the entire game? This one: At a certain point, fairly early on, Conway, his dog and Shannon Marquez (Weaver's cousin) have to visit the Bureau of Reclaimed Spaces - a kind of super-bureaucracy that exists both on and just off The Zero, both inside and outside. It distorts reality and plays with surrealism like China Mieville and Haruki Murakami do, dropping references to Kafka and 100 Years of Solitude and Appalachian myths, all seasoned with a wicked, wry and weird sense of humor. It is a magical realist adventure, following in the traces of Gabriel Garcia Marquez (natch) and Neil Gaiman.
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Weaver explains to Conway that in order to find 5 Dogwood Drive, he's going to have to take The Zero - a secret route through the caves running beneath the county, navigated by symbol, by sound, by memory.ħ years, five parts, a series of interludes that are beautiful, haunting, heartbreaking and often all three at the same time - that's the entirety of 'Kentucky Route Zero.'ħ years, five parts, a series of interludes that are beautiful, haunting, heartbreaking and often all three at the same time - that's the entirety of Kentucky Route Zero. A transient mathematician whose life brushes up against the lives of a dozen other characters over the course of the full game, Weaver vanishes and reappears, is talked about more than she exists, is cryptic but never lies. Gets directions to a farmhouse "just past the burning tree that is always on fire" and meets Weaver Marquez. Find it for them and they vanish - gone without a trace, without explanation. You go downstairs into the gas station's basement and there are three friends playing a strange game around a card table, but they're missing their 20-sided die. There was a gas station (blocky primary colors against an ink-black night) called Equus Oils, a blind man called Joseph, a broken computer. Still trying to do his job and find his way. He was quiet, resigned - a man worn down to a nub even in the opening minutes, but still, you know, there. In the past, in his regrets, in the moment. In a hundred different ways, he was lost. It was about nothing at all - about a man named Conway and his hound dog in a sun hat trying to make a delivery to 5 Dogwood Drive, somewhere in the long dark of a mythical Kentucky night.Ĭonway was lost. In 2013, Act 1 was a minimalist point-and-click adventure with a cliffhanger ending. It took seven years for the three-person team at Cardboard Computer to finish their masterpiece about a sad, regretful man making one last delivery for his employer's failing antique shop. All Tech Considered Reading The Game: The Long Dark
