Kentucky Route Zero Critic Reviews

Melancholic, all too real, but in the end, hopeful, Kentucky Route Zero is a reflection of what it's like to survive as an everyday American. It's an adventure concerned not just with our country's endemic issues, but with the people at the center and their undying perseverance in the face of economic cruelty. As an adventure game, it is perhaps one of the finest games ever written, ebbing and flowing between the perspectives of not just other characters, but the lens we see it through. All considered as the sum of its many, equally magnificent parts, Kentucky Route Zero is a game I won't forget for a long, long time.

A magical adventure almost a decade in the making, Kentucky Route Zero is every bit as good as you've heard—and maybe more.

Quotation forthcoming.

Cardboard's work is an incredibly rich, complex, personal experience, but for which it is very easy to feel empathy, since it manages to tell from the popular and human perspective greater events of each of us. A piece of video game history.

By the final cut to black, we're looking forward to making more connections like the ones we find here, before we take our final turn off Interstate 65 and fall into the Zero's dark, enveloping embrace.

This special Kickstarter project, which spanned five episodes over seven years, comes to an end. This point-and-click sequence is bursting at the seams with creativity and strange happenings. There is no better writing in video games.

A compelling story about rural America that is both surreal and thoughtful, if a little disorienting.

Kentucky Route Zero offers a unique narrative but somewhat frustrating experience that must be enjoyed at a slow pace.

Stylistically impressive story about fates and memories. One that lacks a central theme as well as gameplay direction, though.

Exceptional dialogue served even in most exquisite forms (mini-games, different perspective, mixed chronology) are still not enough for the story to be compatible with this medium or to be worth telling altogether. The result is slow and difficult to ingest and sometimes even unpleasant in its archaic mechanics.