Kentucky Route Zero Review

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Kentucky Route Zero’s fifth and final act launches on PC on January 28 alongside its TV Edition, which brings the entire story to PS4, Xbox One, and Switch. This review is taking a fresh look at Kentucky Route Zero as a whole now that all five acts are complete.

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I couldn’t stop taking screenshots as I played Kentucky Route Zero. Almost every location in this surreal adventure game could be printed out and framed on the wall as a work of art all its own, but it’s the strange and twisting story that fans have been following for nearly seven years that ties them all together. That mystical story can feel appropriately mysterious at times and confusingly arbitrary at others, but it’s a heartwarming journey I’m very glad to have taken.

Kentucky Route Zero is ostensibly a point-and-click adventure game, but to call it that can be misleading. It’s only tangentially in the same realm as classics like Monkey Island or Grim Fandango, replacing item collection and puzzle solving with reams of intimate dialogue and an impressive amount of choice in how your characters navigate every conversation.

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You begin Act 1 as Conway, a delivery truck driver trying to get to an address that seemingly doesn’t exist on any map, apparently only accessible through a peculiar hidden highway called the Zero. While that simple delivery goal is your motivation through Kentucky Route Zero’s five acts, Conway slowly accumulates companions along the way, each an interesting character in their own right. Their presence lets you further shape the conversations they are faced with.

Through the Eyes of Another

One of my favorite things about Kentucky Route Zero is how frequently it shakes up the way its dialogue is delivered, constantly adding to its bag of tricks. Some scenes may be straightforward conversations from a classic point-and-click side view, while others are entirely from the perspective of security guards watching your characters through security footage and discussing the scene in the past tense.

Two of my favorite scenes include an Interlude between Acts 2 and 3 where you’re watching a play from the perspective of a silent actor on stage, and another later on where you control a cat as they run around and listen to your characters’ conversations instead of moving those characters directly. Since Kentucky Route Zero is almost entirely about finding and then clicking through dialogue options, this endless creativity is a vital reason the roughly eight hours it took me to reach the credits stayed fresh.

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That said, things certainly start simpler, with the creative storytelling increasing greatly as the campaign progresses. While Kentucky Route Zero was initially released episodically, I had never played any of it until now, and the age of its first acts is abundantly clear. Act 1 and 2 were released in 2013, and their presentation and structure can pale in comparison to the latter acts at – especially when played in 2020 after games like Night in the Woods, which clearly took a page out of this book. (It also doesn’t help that Conway’s leg is broken for most of both acts, causing you to move at a frustratingly slow pace.)

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In a very real sense, playing Kentucky Route Zero is like taking a walk through time, each episode growing more ambitious and unexpected than the last. As a result, every act is delightfully surprising even when played back to back – fully hooking me around Act 3 when it starts diverging further from a standard point-and-click structure. Still, the charming characters and captivating writing kept me interested the whole time, broken leg and all.

RPG – Random Poetry Generator

One of the first tasks you are given in Kentucky Route Zero is to unlock a computer, but this simple activity sets the stage for what you’ll be doing essentially the entire game. The computer’s owner tells Conway the password is some poem he enters through muscle memory, comically suggesting Conway just starts typing to see what happens. No matter what lines you pick from the pre-written options, you’ll always enter the right password – that’s the basis of this entire adventure.

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As you travel the Zero and hunt for your MacGuffin delivery address, you’ll constantly be picking dialogue options for your characters, not knowing the “correct” answer to any of them – as soon as you choose, your answer becomes fact and, narratively, has always been fact. These choices can be as mundane as the name of Conway’s dog (my sweet old girl was named Blue) or as deep as if a character has siblings and what the context of their relationship is to them. A particularly magical moment in Act 3 has you picking the lyrics to a gorgeous song as it’s sung back to you in real time, coupled with more beautiful visuals. It easily stands as one of my favorite scenes in a game in a long time.

The choices you make never really change the outcome of the plot, but they do drastically shift what story you’ll hear as you progress. And once your group of weary travelers grows and offers more perspectives for you to inhabit, dialogue can change even more. Instead of just choosing Conway’s responses, you can often decide which character replies – whether its Conway himself, the more forthright Shannon (your other lead protagonist and the first to join his journey), or a whimsically imaginative child named Ezra. Either option generally locks off the other responses entirely – I’m sure there’s a whole novel’s worth of dialogue I didn’t see.

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By the final act, you’ll control so many people that you’re effectively just having conversations with yourself. But, somehow, Kentucky Route Zero trained me up to that point so that, miraculously, it felt entirely natural. Besides, the discussions were so often engaging and interesting that I loved picking conversation paths and marching merrily down them of my own volition – it’s the same as writing poetry for a computer password without ever knowing the “right” answer, just on a significantly more elaborate scale.

Rocky Roads

But while Kentucky Route Zero’s writing is consistently strong, the way in which it’s delivered sometimes isn’t – the biggest problem being an overabundance of exposition. I adored that this is a strange and mysterious tale that doesn’t outright explain much of its world, but then random characters you meet briefly in a gas station would abruptly launch into their life’s story in direct opposition of that style. These dumps of backstory are always well-written, just hamfistedly presented, which caused Kentucky Route Zero’s already slow and deliberate pacing to stutter at times

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While Kentucky Route Zero often focuses on smaller story moments like this, the larger meat of its tale is a touching one, too. I ultimately took it as a story about home, both what home actually means and how people find it, either intentionally or unexpectedly. That theme recurs throughout without being shoved in your face, and I was fully invested in Conway and Shannon’s journey whether I tried to read deeper into it or not.

The folk that join them along the way are worth getting attached to, as well, particularly Junebug and Johnny the musical duo – who are robots, I guess? – even if how or why any of these people start following you is never really justified. A couple of the big character moments were similarly under-explained and seemed frustratingly avoidable from the perspective of an onlooker – this certainly didn’t happen often, but sometimes I wished for the level of control Kentucky Route Zero’s constant dialogue choices make it feel like you have. Without spoiling anything, a few of the threads of key characters are left unsatisfyingly hanging by the time the credits roll, too.

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This isn’t really a story that wants (or even needs) to tie up all of those threads, and thankfully for the most part that works in its favor. Apart from that handful of incongruous disappointments, the end of this seven-year story was really quite lovely, leaning into many of Kentucky Route Zero’s strengths without ruining the wonder at its heart with over explanation – a fate likely worse than the smaller missteps it did make along the way.

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Journey to the Savage Planet Review

The latest game news from IGN - one of my fave channels ever - check it out It’s not a surprise to learn that Journey to the Savage Planet’s creative director last worked on Far Cry 4. The two games are made broadly out of the same pieces: a lush explorable map, some light looting and crafting, and a satirical story as the backbone to hold it all up. But where the Far Cry series has increasingly revolved around a single loop – go to map marker, shoot things at map marker, pick up loot – Journey to the Savage Planet attempts to explode that notion by using its open-ish world far more liberally. It succeeds, for a while. There’s still combat, but Journey to the Savage Planet’s world is also used as a platform for non-guided exploration, puzzle solving, scavenger hunts, and loads of fart jokes. Perhaps its biggest fault is that, as time goes on, it feels as though it can’t quite escape the inexorable gravitational pull towards combat video games so often have, ending with a feeling of ‘cut-price Far Cry’, rather than the grand science fiction experiment it could and perhaps should have been. You wouldn’t know that upon starting out, however. Journey to the Savage Planet opens with a comedic flourish – a pleasingly overblown FMV featuring the CEO of Earth’s fourth-best interstellar exploration company informs you that you’ve landed, er, ‘heavily’ on a planet, codenamed AR-Y 26, that could be used to resettle our species. Your job is to explore it, catalogue its flora and fauna, and see if there’s some kind of cosmic sludge lying around that you can use to refuel your ship and head home. With a certain inevitability, you soon discover that something else has visited AR-Y 26 before you, and your primary mission becomes to find out what it was, why it left gigantic structures all over the place and, perhaps most importantly, why it isn’t here anymore. [ignvideo url="https://www.ign.com/videos/2020/01/27/10-minutes-of-journey-to-the-savage-planet-gameplay"] It’s an intoxicating set-up, prodding you into its well conceived (if slightly low-rent) pulp sci-fi world – monsters that liberally spray Nickelodeon gunge, giant mushrooms, inexplicably floating islands and all – teaching you how to get around, and then pretty much leaving you alone. There’s a very broad, but not unenjoyable, satire at work behind all this, showing a version of future humanity devoured and repurposed by mega-corporations – which becomes just a touch ironic when you consider that the developer was bought by Google shortly before release.

Spliced DNA

Initially, Savage Planet offers the literal upward momentum and bright palette (both in colour and and emotion) of Grow Home, the slowly uncovered alien history/conspiracy of Outer Wilds, and the gameified taxonomy of Zelda: Breath of the Wild’s Sheikah Slate camera. Ultimately, all those inspirations amount to watching a series of numbers tick up in the form of a naked quest to discover 100% of places (which, delightfully, fills your ship with postcards for them, illustrated like ‘70s novel covers), find 100% of the buried bits of alien technology, and see 100% of nature’s cruellest mistakes. That’s no bad thing, however, if the pursuit of 100% is fun along the way. When Savage Planet begins, it absolutely is. I spent most of my opening hours obsessively scanning wildlife, working out what was coming out of the unidentified egg sacs I kept popping (turns out it’s a series of seeds, used for the likes of bouncing, grappling, or gluing prey to the floor), and returning to my ship/hub, the Javelin, to watch the Justin Roiland-flavoured adverts for dystopic products that play on every screen when you walk in. I spent almost none of those hours doing what Savage Planet asked me to, and I was very rarely reminded that I should be doing something else. It was great. [widget path="global/article/imagegallery" parameters="albumSlug=journey-to-the-savage-planet-screenshots&captions=true"] This isn’t quite an open world game – a Metroid-esque series of upgrades have to be bought with scavenged resources in order to access new areas and biomes – but it’s surprisingly self-directed. Early on, I ignored a mission to find an alien alloy in favour of ‘looking for cool stuff in caves’, when I came across a miniature treasure puzzle hidden behind a labyrinth of crystalline tunnels. After I solved it, that same alloy popped out of a chest, and my AI sidekick, EKO, congratulated me on finding it in completely the wrong place. It was a moment that sold me on a concept – I could seemingly travel down the critical path by… not necessarily travelling down the critical path. Sadly, the further down that path I wandered, the less that concept seemed enticing. The element I least enjoyed about those early stages was Savage Planet’s approach to combat. You’re given an upgradeable pistol early on, but are encouraged to use it to interact with the environment just as much as pop wandering Pufferbirds to see what comes out. That doesn’t stay the case – the further up AR-Y 26’s mysterious central tower you travel, the more aggressive the wildlife becomes, and the more rewards are locked behind just mindlessly shooting things. Eventually, you start finding wildlife with tiny, glowing weak spots, and even rote, pattern-led boss fights blocking your way. Coupled with the fact that pistol upgrades are almost universally dull – the most interesting being to add a ricochet effect – and exploring certain areas becomes an over-cautious chore rather than an intriguing investigation.

[poilib element="articleSubHeader" parameters="label=My%20Meat%20Buddy%20and%20Me"]Each time you turn it on, Journey to the Savage Planet offers an online co-op option. Playing with someone else changes little about the experience – which is the perfect choice, as it turns out, because traipsing and spelunking across AR-Y 26 remains a pleasure with a friend, not least when you start messing with its more open-ended mechanical systems together. It even helps allay my issues with combat, with many enemies becoming much shorter work when someone else can flank around and hit their weak spots (although it doesn't quite make up for the copmbat being tedious in the first place). My favourite part of co-op, however, is the lore reasoning for your partner being there in the first place: it turns out player two is a semi-living golem of reconstituted meat scraps, poured into a spacesuit for your exploration pleasure. Which is how I see most of my friends, as it happens.

It’s not that I think combat shouldn’t be in this kind of game, it’s that the ratio is off – the abundance of combat doesn’t match up with how much variation you can get out of it. Far Cry has a lot of violence, and a lot of different ways to perform it; Savage Planet has quite a bit of violence too, but just a single pistol and those afore-mentioned seeds (which are, at best, extremely situational items). In the context of what systems and choices are offered as a whole, combat is the least interesting one, and yet you’re forced into it near-constantly by the final hours. The upshot is that Savage Planet slowly devolves from a free-wheeling muckabout in an unfamiliar game world into something far more expected, and far less interesting. That hopeful, experimental core never truly disappears, but it’s shrouded by the need to dully clear out areas with your pistol before actually looking around them or solving their mysteries. By its final stages, that rush for 100% felt far less appealing.

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My Hero Academia: Season 4, Episode 15 Review

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This review contains spoilers for My Hero Academia Season 4, episode 15, "Smoldering Flames," aka episode 78 overall. To refresh your memory of where we left off, check out our review of MHA Season 4, episode 14.

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At its midpoint, episode 14, “Bright Future”, abandoned the clean-up and the aftermath of the raid on Shie Hassaikai HQ to place the spotlight on Shigaraki in a scene that was soaked in dread and gave him back some of the terror that once defined him. Episode 15, “Smoldering Flames” took us back to that scene in its opening, recounting it more or less as it happened and giving Shigaraki the equivalent of the action movie money shot where the hero walks away from an explosion, carefree in the face of chaos. It’s a serviceable intro to the episode that reminds us there is still – always – a threat to face.

“Smoldering Flames” also reveals My Hero Academia’s new OP, and what an utter delight it is. The show has never had an OP like this: one that foregoes any action shots at all, barely gives screen time to any character who isn’t in Class 1-A, and could easily convince us that this is a high school slice-of-life anime, rather than a shonen battle anime. Casual clothes, happy banter, pop-art colours, and a bouncy accompanying melody all work together to encourage fans to kick back and enjoy the light-hearted antics of Class 1-A that it promises. A final funny touch added to this OP is that, once again, Deku enjoys all the sakuga and yet doesn’t actually do anything action-heavy with it. Is this Bones trolling us? Maybe, but it’s hilarious.

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As for the episode itself, it is cleverly bookended by scenes that advance the arc, centred around Gran Torino and the legacy of All For One. But everything in-between is intimate, character-focused introspection that drifts through a fog of gentle optimism for the future. The OP implies that this next arc will be a light-hearted one, but this episode doesn’t throw us into that atmosphere in a jarring manner, after the events of the first half of the season. Instead, it begins in the same sombre place that episode 14 left off from, and slowly builds to an optimistic place by the end.

The bulk of the episode’s perspective rests on Deku and his interactions with his classmates. In the first half, he visits Mirio in his room, with the two sharing a layered heart-to-heart as Deku grapples with projecting an outward positivity and trying to understand and process the real dark aftereffects of their fight. In fact, the entire episode, in one way or another, is about how this fight with Overhaul will have lasting repercussions on everyone who was involved in it.

That’s something My Hero Academia excels at: From the scars on Deku’s hands that never go away to the permanent physical and emotional changes we see in characters like All Might and now Mirio, change in My Hero Academia is lasting and carries real consequences.

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This episode really allows fans to take stock of this, as we see more than once how Deku has changed and grown so far. The fights he has won or lost and the people he has worked with have actively changed his personality, his view of the world, and even his body.

The episode might not be an action-heavy one, and it might not do much to set up a new arc, but it is an intimate and moving installment that celebrates the show’s core strengths. In its second half, we enjoy a reunion between the members of Class 1-A who were in the heat of the fight (Midoriya, Ochako, Tsuyu, and Kirishima) and the rest of the class. It’s here that we get to see such a broad blend of emotion on display.

Both Bakugo and Todoroki, for example, are keeping everyone at arm’s length and acting aloof. While the rest of the class seems confused by this, it’s clear to us that they’re jealous and feeling a lot of pent-up impotence from not getting the chance to flex their own hero muscles in the recent arc. It’s clever characterisation of two boys we’ve barely seen a peep from all season long - though it’s clear that’s all about to change.

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The Outsider: Episode 4 Review

The latest game news from IGN - one of my fave channels ever - check it out Warning: Full spoilers for the episode follow... [poilib element="accentDivider"] With The Outsider's fourth episode, "Que Viene el Coco," we start to better understand how this tale will take up 10 full episodes. Even though a slow-burn pace has already been clearly established, this was the first chapter where it felt like viewers might creep ahead of the story a little bit. Not in a terrible way, mind you -- and, of course, I'm discounting those who've read the book and might know certain story beats ahead of time -- but as Holly dug deeper into the creature's path of destruction we started to see the full forest in a way that the main characters still can't. Granted, we already know the killer is a supernatural beast and so the show's job now is to reconcile what we've easily accepted with its "real world" characters who are going to think this is all horses***. Except for Holly, naturally, who's key role here is to be the most open-minded of the heroes, and the one who'll more likely follow the mythology with no judgment (while taking pepper spray to the face). Her arc this week had a lot of legs, as she traveled from Dayton to New York to sift through the mystery of Heath, the hospital worker who was set up for child murders the same way Terry was. [widget path="global/article/imagegallery" parameters="albumSlug=midseason-tv-2020-34-shows-we-cant-wait-to-watch&captions=true"]

RALPH BREAKS THE INTERNET

Ralph's stay-at-home investigation lagged a bit, however. While Holly was out uncovering the unfathomable, Ralph was stuck. Fortunately, Ben Mendelsohn is such a joy to watch, even in sludgy situations, that he always delivers fascinating nuggets of realization. Of course, Ralph's personal story is one of grief and "being stuck," so his cycle of frustration and unproductiveness felt apropos. While Terry's widow was harassed by stealth reporters and hostile locals, Ralph watched surveillance videos over and over, and then later sat by the teen van thief while he draw a picture of a hooded man with a melted face. None of it led him to anything more than just a bigger feeling that things weren't right about the case though. The show needs to position him into a place where he might be able to believe what Holly brings back, as an explanation, and right now he's pretty far from that point. There are a lot of invisible daggers pointed at Ralph right now. Both Jack and Claude, in the end, might be the pieces of the creature's puzzle that sound the alarm. Jack's being puppeted by the beast, building a nest for it out in the woods with supplies and dead animals, but his behavior's already unsettling so it might take a while for people to notice. Claude, on the other hand, might be next in line as the creature's double, having been scratched. But it'd also be breaking its own M.O. since copying Claude wouldn't take the monster far out of town to a new community. [ignvideo url="https://www.ign.com/videos/2019/12/06/hbos-the-outsider-official-trailer-ben-mendelsohn-jason-bateman"]

EL COCO

The creature wasn't given an actual labeling this week, but like Holly's brief blurb last week about different cultures' names for doppelgängers, it got lumped in with many old world tales about boogeymen -  hammering home the idea of yesteryear yarns about goblins and ghouls being based in real life and that we, in the modern era, just dismiss them because of our ancestors' limited knowledge of the world. For now, "El Coco," seems to be the most used moniker, coupled with the idea of a "grief-eater" - a being that creates a tragedy and then dines out for a while on the sadness everyone in the surrounding area feels. And as we've seen with this particular monster, it's able to get in people's heads and make them kill themselves. And then those death are covered up in the wake of the overall awfulness of the incident. El Coco is all about covertness and cover-ups. Holly's investigation, which brought back Derek Cecil's Andy (and started up a small romance between the two), gave us more. More of what we basically knew about the creature's pattern. Not only did we get Heath, and the deaths of his brother and mother, but we met Maria, who'd been framed states away. In the wake of her crucible, she lost her father and uncle to a vengeful member of her dead boy's family (which, as we know, is the other way the beast creates more death). So yes...more. What will everyone think when Holly tells them all of this? Hell, what does Andy think? Like, the patterns are clearly unmistakable. What will be the thing that helps everyone get over the hump of disbelief?

COPYCAT

All of the world and lore building regarding the "Coco" creature is interesting (which is fortunate because it made up the bulk of this episode), but the most fascinating element came with the diner scene between Heath and "Maria." It was this week's tiny mystery, opening the episode with flirty small talk about eggs and syrup. This being, this entity, is actually good at becoming a person. At emulating an individual to a degree that they'll think they're out on a date with them. It doesn't just fake basic mannerisms, like it seemed to be doing when it was Terry, but it managed to get Heath in the sack for a full sexual encounter. And with that came the funniest part of the episode where the creature still had to scratch Heath's back in order to gain access to his form when...it was in the middle of having sex with him. You'd think the sharing of intimate bodily fluids would also be a way for Coco to absorb a person's essence, but no. It still needed to get that scratch in.

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