Growing up, I spent every summer K through 5 at the Wu school for daycare while my parents were at work
and for a couple of weeks every summer,
a few teachers would take a large handful of kids
to a cabin in the Sierra Nevadas
for hiking and swimming and,
I don't know, looking at banana slugs?
This was a long time ago.
And every drive to and from, to keep his van load of pre-adolescents on a four-and-a-half hour drive
from cracking each other's skulls open and feasting on the goo inside,
Mr. Wu would tell us these long, elaborate
stories that I'm pretty sure he made up.
He spent multiple summers telling us this one about these child genius brothers- who were also murderers?
There was this bit where one of them strung
his teacher upside down from a tree
and beat him with a switch of poison ivy.
There was also a plot about one brother getting all the children in America addicted to drugs
and the other brother, having reformed,
inventing a cure for heroin.
This was the first Bush years, where suburban
white folks were very much concerned
with juvenile delinquency and, uh....
"crack babies".
But there was also a story about superheroes where he let each of us make up a character,
and there was one where I remember nothing except that it was about a family of sasquatches.
Many of these stories shared characters.
It was kind of a Wu-extended universe.
But the thing is, I didn't go to Sierra camp every year, and when I did, I didn't always ride in Mr.
Wu's car both ways,
and no matter what, there was always a full year in between installments.
So whenever Mr. Wu and his ever calm and confident voice
called back to some character or
dramatic beat I didn't recognize,
I never fully knew whether it was something I'd missed, something I'd forgotten, or something he'd just made up.
But under the spell he cast to keep us rapt and silent,
every word he said felt true- and vaguely familiar.
This feeling has been an essential piece
of Kentucky Route Zero for me.
I don't know how many people feel the same,
and now that it's complete,
I wonder if anyone will feel this way about it ever again.
Kentucky Route Zero is a game in five acts
released first six months apart,
and then a year, and then two years, and then four.
I came in around...
here,
[Onscreen: arrow pointing to middle of Act II and Act III]
playing Act I and Act II right after the other and, while I didn't have to wait the full year for Act III,
I knew my memories were already spotty
when it came out.
What was I doing when I left off?
Had I met these two bikers before?
When and where did I meet all these people with me?
This sense of...
Permeable amnesia was amplified by the quiet surreality of the story.
Previous episodes were like dreams, half-remembered.
I couldn't recall the names of all the central characters,
but I will never forget "Third floor. (Bears.)".
The game leaves a lot of room for
unique experiences between players,
scenes that some will see and not others,
characters not everyone meets,
but the overall shape remains the same,
and the shape is what I can recall now,
after the whole thing is wrapped up.
In Act I, I was a delivery man needing to find Dogwood Drive
and in search for the titular highway
that would take me there,
I broke my leg in an abandoned mine.
In Act II, I eventually found someone out in the woods to fix my leg and I— I think I rode a giant eagle?
In Act III, I traveled underground caves and accidentally sold my soul to a distillery run by skeletons.
In Act IV, my friends and I floated down a river on a tugboat until the skeletons came to collect me,
and in Act V, my friends made it to
Dogwood Drive without me.
Hanging off those bones, I can still
dredge up bits of the journey.
I remember a boy picking mushrooms in a cave,
Junebug singing beautifully in a cafe,
watching a town rebuild from the perspective of a cat.
There was a sequence composed entirely
from security camera footage,
though I don't remember what it was about,
or when it happened.
I played a text adventure in Act III,
but I don't remember why.
What I'll never forget is how in the beginning, I, the player, not the protagonist Conway, but I...
got to pick the name and gender
of the dog who traveled with me.
I wasn't just naming a dog.
I was deciding what the dog's name had always been.
I was writing the past in the present.
This game existed for two to three hours
every one to four years,
but every time I sat down with it, anything
the designers put in front of me, I believed.
Between episodes, they could have replaced one of the characters with a sentient freshwater squid,
and I probably would have said, "Yeah! I think I remember that!"
History was malleable.
And I suspect that's why so many
people, when describing the game,
reference the tall tales of the south.
The word is folkloric.
And it's over now.
Whether this was the plan- or whether it simply became part of the experience by circumstance-
for the last nine years,
the spell Kentucky Route Zero cast
has been of a story still being told.
Film critic Mike D'Angelo once described Paolo Sorrentino's This Must Be the Place with the phrase,
"digression as epiphany",
and that sums up Kentucky Route Zero completely.
It begins with the search for a specific street
and every act is about the strange things
that keep you from arriving.
It was nine years of never arriving.
It seemed as though arriving was no longer the point,
had never BEEN the point,
that the story could not be finished.
A perpetual middle, as though at any time,
 somewhere in the world,
someone was still telling the story.
I don't remember any of Mr. Wu's stories having endings either.
Or beginnings.
Seemingly, he always started and finished
on the rides I didn't take with him.
But then it ended.
That it managed to bring such a long-running project
full of so much strangeness
to a conclusion that truly satisfied is
perhaps less impressive
than the simple impossibility that it ended at all.
It felt like it wasn't supposed to.
And this is not and will not be everyone's experience.
Many came in closer to the end, played several acts in a row, and followed a fairly clear plot,
if a weird and rambling one.
Many replayed episodes in preparation
for the next release,
and some waited nearly a decade for the game
to be complete before starting.
And some probably just have better memories than I have.
I don't presume that what I'm describing
is the "right" experience,
only that it was mine.
And it was remarkable.
And unless people playing for the first time finish an act
and willingly refuse to play the next
until at least six months have passed,
It's not one people are gonna have anymore.
As I type this on my couch, I'm realizing that in order to capture footage for this very video,
I will have to replay the game.
And that by the time you hear this,
the very experience I am describing...
will have been overwritten.
Kentucky Route Zero concluding this January means it is over in a way more final than most games end.
I know that in some ways I missed out.
I've heard people describe multi-part
subplots that I couldn't follow,
talk about loving characters whose
stories I couldn't remember,
but I always knew, I could play the game their way later.
I could do it in one go any time,
but the way I was playing was ephemeral.
I could only have that once.
I don't remember much of the plot,
but I remember the mood.
I remember the meaning.
It's a game about what the world takes from you.
The primary mode of theft is capitalism,
but there's also aging, injury, decay,
and the simple passage of time.
Metal rusts, and bones break,
and towns die as people move elsewhere.
Things change, and pieces of them
get lost that can never come back.
And we mourn,
and we let go,
and we move on into something new.
And even if it's never the same,
it can still be some kind of okay.
Someday,
maybe.
[Song - This World Is Not My Home]
♪ This world is not my home ♫
♪ I'm just passing through ♫
♪ My treasures and my hopes ♫
♪ Are a place beyond the blue ♫
