It’s a saga that started in 2013, and ended on Tuesday, January 28. The fifth and final episode of Kentucky Route Zero, video game produced by the small American studio Cardboard Computer, is available on PC and now also on Switch, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One.
Critics did not wait for the release of their last episode to dedicate it. In its retrospective of the 2010s, the American specialized site Polygon made it its fourth best game of the decade. Just released, the final episode is already considered by some as one of the most important outings of the year 2020.
Kentucky Route Zero is what you could call an author’s game, originally designed by two people, Jake Elliott and Tamas Kemenczy (accompanied by the composer Ben Babbitt), and funded to the tune of 8,500 dollars (7,800 euros) in 2011 thanks to a crowdfunding campaign that did not make an impression.
Its impact on the industry, however, is considerable. Asked by The world, Hannah Nicklin, head of the Danish studio Die Gute Fabrik and game writer mutazione, very inspired by Kentucky Route Zero, abstract : “Some works are pivotal in the history of a media. This is the case of Kentucky Route Zero. “
Something radical
Resituons. In terms of game mechanics, Kentucky Route Zero Nowadays appears quite classic: a kind of adventure game free of its artifices (and in particular its puzzles), which focuses on storytelling. At the end of the first episode, however, there is something radical in this approach.
For Pierre Corbinais, game writer Bury me my love and Haven, the originality of Kentucky Route Zero hold on to his way “To adopt the mechanics of [jeu d’aventure] replacing logic with poetry ”. He remembers one day in 2011:
“I had been invited by I do not know what a miracle on a secret forum where the finest independent artists of the time met. And Jake Elliott, one of my favorite authors, posted a first demo of “Kentucky Route Zero” in “I’m working on this stuff with Tamas Kemenczy right now, what do you think”? “
This prototype is limited to what will become the opening stage. We see Conway, a worn delivery man responsible for fulfilling a last order. Launched on the roads of Kentucky, with his bumpy van and his old dog, he stopped at a gas station to ask for directions. In this place overlooked by a monumental statue of a horse, a poet pump attendant warns him: to find his address, he will have to take the elusive “zero route”. The intrigue thus set up is imbued with a magical realism “Which was unlike anything known” – at least in video games.
Economy of means
The first shock is graphic: “I would never display a video game poster in my living room”, assures Julien Ribassin, founder of the French studio Dejima Games and developer of firegirl. ” Kentucky Route Zero is perhaps the only exception. “
Offices installed in a church, impossible architectures mixing interior and exterior: Cardboard Computer describes changing universes, in perpetual mutation. Illustrator Shannon Kao boasts places “Incredibly original. My comics are trying to recapture that spirit: even the walls of a cave say something about the river that used to flow there ”.
“There are so many big and small scenes that I think about all the time, lists Cel Davison, from Humblegrove studio, developer of No Longer Home. The ghosts of the miners who haunt the flooded cave, Lula Chamberlain who reads his letter of refusal, Ezra and Cate who collect mushrooms, Conway who is ripped off … Each set is treated like a theater scene or a film set, each thought is emphasized by light and camera effects. “
All with a remarkable economy of means, little detailed 3D models, decorations that look like paper structures that you would think came from an animated book.
“A bottomless pit”
Nothing is normal in the world of Kentucky Route Zero, but nothing surprises the characters who populate it. Neither its untraceable roads, nor its giant eagle hovering over a forest populated by homeless people.
Cardboard Computer reverses perspectives, successively putting us in command of different characters, sometimes several at the same time. Troubling, when you have to do both the questions and the answers: you never know very well whether you are an actor or a spectator, a decision-maker of the characters’ fate or simply witness to a world that is beyond us.
For Quinn K., Austrian developerAn outcry and translator of the influential Belgian game OFF, “It would be simplistic to consider it as a simple video game. It’s a bottomless pit, and the closest thing to an example of literature in a video game. When it came out, there were few games that looked like that, and above all, no game that spoke like that.
“What makes it an important game is the confidence he has in the player and his patience. It’s a slow game, it takes its time. I’ve never seen such a demanding game with the player, nor so rewarding. “
“Elliott and Kemenczy had their vision of the game, and they delivered it like that, raw, without coating or explanation”, adds Pierre Corbinais, excited by the radical nature of the proposal. For him, it’s “The stereotype of the mysterious beautiful brown”, attractive, intriguing, but we don’t know if he has much to say. Luck: over the years and episodes, however, emerges a common thread, and ultimately a point.
Between David Lynch and the southern gothic
For Hannah Nicklin, the Cardboard Computer game wears the clothes of a “Modern classic, like the works of Margaret Atwood, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, or the album Revolver of the Beatles “. She goes even further, comparing the work of Jake Elliott and Tamas Kemenczy to a new Odyssey Homer ” a Odyssey for a generation that does not remember that capitalism was not always triumphant. “
Kentucky Route Zero is a game about debt, mistakes you can’t make when you have nothing. It depicts ghosts wandering through the abstract ruins of a lost working America, haunting the corridors of museums that will never open. We are somewhere between David Lynch and what the Americans call the “Southern gothic”, a twilight literary genre steeped in the supernatural.
“I don’t know of any other game that has tackled these topics as well, or even tackled these topics quite simply”, says Scott Benson, developer of Night in the Woods. Above all, if he talks about the victims of savage liberalism, Kentucky Route Zero the fact “With dignity, like people who carry hope and love. It’s radical, in a way. “
“I have not seen many other games portray rural America, the America of the freeways. In general, they do it the way the [jeu d’horreur] “Resident Evil 7” or from “The Pitt”, the extension [du jeu postapocalyptique] “Fallout 3”. “
It’s in this, in 2013, that the real revolution of Kentucky Route Zero : making a personal game, describing without pathos, and even with a good dose of dream-like, a declining America.
“It made it possible to sublimate banality, normality, adds Scott Benson. It was the first game that made me say to myself, “Oh, OK, I can make games on the places I know, the places where I lived.” There are a lot of good games that wouldn’t exist not without him. And it’s not over. This is the most important game of the decade. ”
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