The fifth and final act of Kentucky Route Zero is finally here, bringing the surreal adventure game to a close with a release on the PS4, PC, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch.
Lobby
Stop off on three and the bears do nothing. You walk through them and they just watch you. Hungrily, maybe. Or with boredom. Their big bear heads turn as you move through the floor. They watch you until, eventually, you leave. No comment is made about this. No mention. It just . exists. A floor full of bears.
Which is genius, really. Brilliant because the power of magical realism as a genre the thing that makes it so spooky, so off-putting and able to get at the particular crawling dread of this modern century is that every injection of the surreal, the impossible, the
Cardboard Computer
For years now, some of the best, wildest, most moving or revealing stories we ve been telling ourselves have come not from books, movies or TV, but from video games. So we re running an occasional series, Reading The Game
, in which we take a look at some of these games from a literary perspective.
There are games where the story exists only to knit together gameplay elements and action set-pieces. There are games where story is an afterthought entirely. There are games where story is the point, which live on the screen as vehicles for telling tales and offering players agency or immersion or both. And there are games where the story is something you invent yourself, taking the lead role in a movie written in every button-press and roll-dodge.