Highway to the sky

Listening to exciting stories is one of the basic desires of man, this was long understood by the authors of modern video games. It is now supposed to have a plot and witty dialogs now - it has come to the limit - it has reached the limit in Bioshock Infinite , a shooter, where a firing from a machine gun in all directions was, in fact, only an annoying obstacle between the player and the development of the plot. Experiments with narrative led video games to the line, where they become similar to literature or cinema; This was especially brightly noticeable in the example of The Novelist , about which Colta.ru already wrote . Kentucky Route Zero also fits with difficulty in the game section - and not only because there is almost no gameplay. The creation of the small studio Cardboard Computer invents its own rules of narration and sends the player on a trip to Kentukki, through the abandoned fields of John Steinbeck, along the mystical highway David Lynch.

At first, it seems that we have a textbook Adventor. An old truck drives up to a gas station. Two leave the cab: Conway, a driver at the antiques store, and his elderly dog. The dog has no name yet, and Conway has no idea how to get to his last delivery address (his store ruined). The blind owner of the gas station promises to help, but first we must do something for him: go down to the dark basement and turn on the switch. In the basement, the Conversion will have to find out that some things are more visible in the dark, as well as solve an elegant puzzle - the first and last for the entire game.

Here, Kentucky Route Zero is repelled from the genre of classic quests and moves as if along the path of episodic games of the Telltale Games studio - The Walking Dead and The Wolf Among us . In them, the choice of dialogue line directly affects the course of the game: the dialogs serve as a tool with which the player reaches certain results - up to the death of some characters. Kentucky Route Zero is also fragmented into episodes (three out of five came out) and built on dialogs. But here conversations do not affect the plot - only on the player. Your choice does not matter: any answer determines what new you learn about the heroes of the game, how you will perceive them. And even this is not the main feature of the Kentucky Route Zero : here is Conway enters a room where a girl named Shannon talks on the phone, and the control goes to Shannon right in the middle of the conversation, and Convee becomes an ordinary stranger. Imagine an interactive book where you need to choose questions and answers for all characters at once. Where the past does not exist until you decide what it will be: with the mouth of Shannon you ask the convey, whether he has brothers and sisters. And then, on behalf of the Convei, you are free to come up with a brother with a prestigious profession and a bad character or you can remain the only child in the family. Thus crystallizes the creative method of the authors of Kentucky Route Zero - literary installation. They regularly change optics through which we explore the world of the game and characters. You just looked at the convey by the eyes of Shannon, and a little later you see him through the observation camera, behind which the guards of the museum are hidden. In a sense, Kentucky Route Zero is a game of dolls where every voice is yours. Only here the dolls do not drink tea, but the Hard Times whiskey (“difficult times”), these are adult dolls, shabby and broken, and both in figurative and literally - Conway runs on the screen for a long time.

The local state of Kentukki is an old dilapidated world where the mines are abandoned, the farms are ruined, and the bars live their last days. On the way of the aging driver, new acquaintances await, and each of these people somehow looked into the dark debt hole, which hangs over Kentucky instead of a night sky. Banks take away from them at home, and they go to live in the forest. An absurd machine of bureaucracy with living bears in one of the offices moves to the church building and becomes a modern temple - with an organ where a man naked waist -deep in color shorts plays. Here the Steinbeck hugs with the kafka, and no longer make out which way the Conversa will lead the search address for delivery addresses. “Go to the north-east and turn left, as soon as you see the ugly tree that all the time is in the fire”-it is precisely such guidelines that use the Kentucky Route Zero in the world. But in order to get to the ill -fated address, the Convee needs to go to the Zero highway, which exists in strictly non -evlide space.

It is better to leave the navigation rules in those parts in secret, but you cannot keep silent about one outstanding case on the road. The Convee truck stalls in the middle of the highway - young musicians help with the repair, just drove past. In return, you must go to their concert in the deposit bar The Lower Depths ("at the bottom"). And there you will find magic of a truly Lynchevsky scale: the six -minute song “Too Late to Love You” in the fictional genre of Whisperwave makes you forget about the miracles of the Silencio club from Malholland Drive. The authors bring to the limit our complicity in the creation of the world Kentucky Route Zero - the song is written on the fly, along with the player. The music here was strong: the vagrass coexisted harmoniously with the embosses on the same sad wave, but the scene in The Lower Depths bar displays Kentucky Route Zero to an outrageous height - I have not yet met the game from which goosebumps fled to me.