168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Kentucky Route Zero’s first and second acts came out in 2013, a whole decade ago now, and still people are using it as a touchstone for incredible game writing and impact on the genre as a whole. It most recently drew comparisons to Norco, as both are point-and-click adventure games highly focused on a sense of൲ time and place, with surreal elements, and both are highly lauded for their excellent writing and evocative atmospheres. Some have called KRZ a masterpiece – for me, i♐t was also an agonising fever dream. I still finished it, because I was feeling a sense of awe that no other game has made me feel.
KRZ is frustrating, and some of that is intentional. Over the five acts that I played on one rainy day, I found the characters running in circles, led on a wild goose chase by bureaucrats; my character’s leg was hurt and I had to limp slowly across multiple settings; I was given the vaguest of directions to follow on a map and got turned around; I t💖ried to explore an audio guide to a setting on a phone hotline, only to find every time I wanted to change what I was listening to, I had to hang up and call again, and I had to track on a piece of paper what I’d already listened to. These little inefficiencies reflected the real world in a way I found extremely poignant – irritating, avoidable, but ultimately, genuine replications of daily life.
Another thing I found frustrating was the number of options I was given as to what to look at, what to notice, and what to say. I wanted to explore every corner of the game, but by design, KRZ snatches these options away from me – every choice I made defined the interiority of the character I was playing. Unlike other games, where I could go down every branch of a conversation to get the full picture of a situation, KRZ🍎 forced me to shape the characters with choices I couldn’t renege on. I got it – again, like in real life, you can’t go back in time to say the other thing you considered saying instead.
I found myself chasing the action, rather than staying in the moment, which I began to regret at some point. Act 4 takes place on a tugboat going down an underground river called the Echo, and the boat makes several stops along the way. You can get off and explore the places you stop at (a gas station♛, a beachside bar, a payphone, an island, a tunnel) or you can stay on the boat, with the peacefully napping pets. I wanted to explore, of course I did, so I went, but somehow I was still thinking about the animals. What they were doing, if they were sleeping on the boat, rocked by the slow motions of the river, unaware of what💧 was going on just offshore. I wanted to be where the animals were, not trying to keep up with the game’s lore and catch every single second of narrative. I wanted to stop and appreciate the game’s quiet moments too.
All these frustrations somehow elevated the game’s environment, ma🥃king the surreal, absurd world feel like a ready escape. For every scene that made me groan i🐎ndignantly, there was another that blew me away. I was given forests, giant birds, mines, a boat, bars, and more to explore. I watched two musicians give an incredible performance, I explored an art exhibit filled with pieces that couldn’t have existed in real life, and I briefly experienced life as a cat. Somehow every scene was confusing and exciting in equal measure.
There was so much to wonder at in KRZ, that it made me feel a great amount of fondness for the world we live in. Even the annoying parts remind me of that feeling of awe, making life just that much more tolerable. My favourite works of art are those that make me realise how stupid and small I am. It’s the kind of feeling I only get💜 when I’m out in nature, looking at mountains, or when I have grass between my toes – the feeling of being very very small, swept up in the currents of everything going on around me, and choosing to step out of it for a second to acknowledge that none of it matters. It’s all inconsequential, and that’s freeing! What a liberating thing to feel, and how beautiful it is that KRZ makes me feel it.