Project Kentucky Route Zero: Act V
Tags: Videogames, Reaction, Gaming, Letters, Kentucky Route Zero

Dear Gavin,

While I wasn’t necessarily stumped on what to write about regarding this final act I found that at first I was coming up with a lot of observations that came across facile. “This act is a manifold ending” — obvious. “5 Dogwood Drive is an empty stage or frame; it was about the journey and not the destination all along” — reductive. “Act V is like the calm after a storm” — well, duh. There’s something slippery about Act V, and more than once I felt that perhaps I was missing something. Something grand yet very apparent. Like that sunrise; it was indeed quite a sight. Perhaps I’m just used to having something complex in KRZ to latch onto and pick apart, like a cat given a particularly tangled knot of yarn.

The above is not to say that Act V isn’t complex, but it’s much more elusive in its elegant simplicity. I agree that having the framing of theatre is a helpful tool for orienting oneself not just for this act, but for this entire surreal sojourn. The role you play in this act and its performance is what struck me the most. At first it was the most quizzical thing; why am I cat chasing a dragonfly? What does that have to do with the culmination of the game’s plot? Is it to say all of these happenings were truly happenstance? Is it to show indifference to the cast and their plights (whatever they may truly be)? But then when you think of the interludes and the other roles you inhabit, like (as you pointed out) the Bar-fly, things start to become a little more grounded. I’ll return to this shortly.

By happy accident I had unlocked The Death of the Hired Man by the end of Act V and it’s a lot more definitive in its sequential positioning as an epilogue than the previous four were. Yet the structure of the final interlude is still up for interpretation, consisting of you playing as Emily watching the old TV set in The Lower Depths as she listens to Carrington and Harry have a conversation about what became of the former’s ambitious experimental play. In my playthrough, my suggestions for a performance venue (Equus Oils) led his play to ruin and obscurity. But the only action the player can perform as Emily is to switch (or not switch) TV channels. You can even decide to leave the set on the static between stations (now I’m humming Junebug’s music again). Arguably as a player, all we ever do when gaming is sit in front of a screen and give input. Emily is another instance of the actor as the audience, an extension of the Bar-fly role.

The cat-and-dragonfly role is part of Cardboard Computer’s theatrical rhetoric as well, positing that while we are interacting with things in games, we are often much more passive and at a remove from what’s going on than we think we are. Your Brecht reference is really helpful here, as we navigate the haunted town. We may mew at characters, hiss here at a colony of bats in a barn, or yowl into the well (literally yelling into a void), but ultimately we are each still a witness. You do “direct” conversations here and there, and choose which reveries the townsfolk and ghosts reveal, but beyond that we are there to observe the drawing of the half-curtains as it were. The thoroughness of Cardboard Computer’s artistic direction make them impressive half-curtains, to say the least.

I found throughout my playthrough of Act V that I’m more predisposed to be aware of KRZ’s aesthetic discontinuities than the literal ones. After all, I played this act for the first time as part of the complete “TV Edition,” so the fragmentation and contemplation of events as you waited during the almost 4 years-long intermission couldn’t be part of my mindset. But I do appreciate the void as a motif throughout Act V.

For instance, the well at the centre of town is a void. Yet the well is also a place of emergence, since it is a direct passage from the Zero to 5 Dogwood Drive, which is also a void or a space of potential. I enjoyed how Shannon and the others could imagine different uses for the luminous vastness of the building, including a home and a concert venue. In my final scene, Dogwood Drive seems ready for a new life, even if it isn’t clear yet what shape that new life will take.

Although Cardboard Computer leaves interpretation up to the player, as always, there were echoes here and there of that famous and often quoted sentiment that people are “condemned to be free.” It’s up to the player to make their own meaning. As such, I noticed that in my explorations as the cat, I was essentially performing a “widening gyre” about the town, which put me in my mind of Yeats’ Second Coming. While the end of KRZ is not nearly as dire as the landscape of that poem, there was a sense that the town’s centre couldn’t hold after the storm, either physically or culturally. There was a drowning of innocence of sorts with the loss of the Neighbours, who symbolized the town’s heritage and how it was enfolded into their everyday life before the storm. As you said, you choose who will stay and who will leave the town, and I chose to have Junebug, Johnny, and Ezra become a found family who may or may not stick around (or together, for that matter).

While I didn’t weep at the Neighbours’ funeral, I was still suffused with the melancholy of that scene. We are visiting a town built upon a grave, what seems like mere days before the Consolidated Power Company is due to gentrify it, forcing some if not all the inhabitants to scatter to the winds. Someone describes themselves as the derelict town library’s “only next-of-kin.” Another line that the player can choose for Ron to respond to Clara as she speaks of needing to get home to her dying uncle read as almost child-like in its nonsensical plea: “But with everyone gone, who’ll feed these ghosts?”

The widening gyre also visually made me think of the gallows humour of other acts again as well. You circle the well at the centre of town, as the town’s way of life potentially circles the drain. Coming full circle also comes to mind since this is the end of KRZ’s tale, but since you aren’t really ending in the same place you started, it’s more like you’re closing a loop. As far as we know, none of the crew is going to return to the Zero, thus ending the pattern of briefly bobbing to the surface before plunging down into that underworld once more. But KRZ’s unique brand of humour serves another function as well, one that ties directly into the game’s theatricality.

KRZ’s humour is often self-reflexive, commenting on the limitations of technology and the point-and-click adventure and early text games to which it pays homage. Colossal Cave Adventure, like many adventure games of its era, struggled with its players pushing against the limits of the vocabulary it had for inputting instructions. One solution for mitigating the awkwardness of seeing the seams of the game was not only to acknowledge those seams but to offer nonsensical responses to the player.

Audrey Anable in her study of video games and affect points out that KRZ references this tactic via scenes like Conway needing to write a poem to gain access to the computer at the gas station, or selecting the option ‘Games’ and receiving the ungrammatical response “‘Games’ is not real.” She goes on to posit that the point-and-click dialogue, which has the illusion of seeming like a branching path narrative also points towards the limitations of many systems these characters face such as: “language, networks, bureaucracies, families, histories” to name just a few. I strongly agree with these points especially in regards to KRZ mimicking old-school adventure games. By consciously joking about the limitations that the designers themselves baked in for the purpose of acknowledging and exposing the seams of their game, KRZ sticks to its theatrical framing even at the granular level of text and mechanics.

I’d like to switch gears a bit, and address your point about the discontinuity of the IOU. I chose to look at that item in the inventory as a hopeful marker. The IOU may mean nothing for Conway, but it may mean everything. Perhaps Junebug is completely indifferent to what the IOU means. But she likes to be specific, and she’s no stranger to exchanging favours. Another item I found just as mysterious was the twenty-sided die that the player can pick up in the basement of Equus Oils while Emily, Bob, and Ben as they played tabletop games. The trio reads out the rules of what each number on the die represents in terms of a player’s fate, but other than rolling the die in your inventory, the only other function the die serves is to disappear when Conway does in Act IV. Perhaps Conway holds onto this token while he works at the distillery, a reminder of his journey or a marker of how random chance can impact the trajectory of one’s life. Or perhaps it’s still in Conway’s jacket that he gave to Shannon.

I feel grateful that Cardboard Computer designed this game with mystery as a core design principle. I think KRZ’s mysteries are what keep its spaces (both mental and physical) believable and open to possibility, despite how abstract and allegorical those spaces can be. Although I didn’t have to wait for this conclusion like you and other players did, I still can’t believe I’m here at the end of a decade-long journey. It’s hard not to feel wistful about it.

I hope you are well too, Gavin. May next year be the antithesis of this one. And may whatever roads we travel be done so with intention.

~ P.