Setup: Nintendo Switch Lite/PC
Developer: Cardboard Computer
Publisher: Annapurna Interactive
Release Date: 1/28/2020
Platforms: Windows, Linux, PS4, XB1, Nintendo Switch
You can’t save everyone.
After putting in over 20 hours and multiple playthroughs with Cardboard Computer’s masterpiece Kentucky Route Zero, I stepped away from the game each time with tears streaking my face. I felt hopeless yet filled with hope simultaneously, knowing that bearing witness was enough but wishing I could do more for Conway, for Clara, for Shannon, for this town, for the Neighbors, for the people I just met and the people I’d been traveling with all throughout the game’s long, long night.
But KR0 is not a game that wants you, the player, supreme embodier of all virtual avatars in every other game, to have the power to make that kind of difference. You aren’t Frisk in Undertale. You’re not the Guardian in Destiny. This is not a video game; it’s a play, a grand and solemn Southern Gothic theater production set in the modern world, and you are at best an audience member that’s gotten a bit too handsy. Not everyone wants to be saved. Conway believes he owes a debt, and that’s why he has to leave. His choice, while horrible because we know what is going to happen to him, is his alone to make. Some people will leave the nameless town, despite it being an, as Ursula K. Le Guin described Anarres in The Dispossessed, “an ambiguous utopia.” That, too, is their choice, one we can’t take away from them.
There is a moment that I think speaks for the entire game, a moment when you realize this game isn’t about the furniture delivery to 5 Dogwood Drive, it isn’t about Conway or Shannon or Junebug and Johnny, it’s not about Ezra, it’s not about how weird everything is. It’s about this town, and this world, and what the people here have decided to do, even though it feels like god and the company and the state of Kentucky are against them.
Maya – you and our other visitors might not know about the Out-of-Towner. He came here to work for the company, to dig a ditch. And the company worked him good and hard, and for less than he was worth, but it wasn’t enough. They had to use him up completely.
After that, we became ungovernable. First out of shame, then grief, then anger.
The entire game up to this point has painted its chief metaphysical antagonists, the forces of debt and coercion, as indestructible. But here, in this unnamed town, you see that it’s not impossible to defeat Consolidated Power Company, it’s not impossible to escape Hard Times Distillery, that in fact these mythological behemoths of modern capitalism have weaknesses, can be fought against, and that even in the unlikely Appalachian foothills of Kentucky, a better world is possible. It isn’t easy, no radical project is, and the town will need to be rebuilt countless times. But it is possible. And in this here-and-now, when so many things feel impossible, this moment, this knowledge, is precious.
And as they bury The Neighbors, as they sing the hymn, the town is joined by the ghosts of all they have lost. And another message becomes crystal clear, one that we all hear, sometimes faint and sometimes loud:
Mourn the dead. And fight like hell for the living.
Follow us on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. If you want to support No Escape with dollars I guess, check out our Patreon!