Kentucky Route Zero — the five act point and click adventure by Cardboard Computer — confronts loss at every stage of its thoughtful journey. Conway, a man who delivers antiques for a living, is about to be retired. Lysette, his boss and friend, suffers from an ailing memory. A young boy, Ezra, no longer has a family or home while the workers in Elkhorn Mine arguably encounter the sensation most sharply — their own lives are cut short because bosses told them to dig too deep. Such heartbreak plays out almost exclusively in strange, negative spaces defined by absence as much as anything else. I won’t spoil what happens at the end of its final episode — released just a couple weeks ago — but, needless to say, the lives of these characters do not suddenly fill back up.

Kentucky Route Zero is the culmination of nearly a decade’s work for writer Jake Elliott, artist Tamas Kemenczy, and composer Ben Babbitt, all alumni of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. As the years have worn on, the three person team has stretched, contracted, and reshaped the possibilities of its fundamental tools: text, art, and music. The game might share a mechanical resemblance to other text adventures — including the genre’s progenitor Colossal Cave Adventure (_which Elliott played as a kid ) — but it’s moodier and more serious-minded than anything I’ve played. Despite following what Kemenczy describes as a “dream logic,” the game feels more resonant with social realist filmmaker Ken Loach whose I, Daniel Blake explores similar systemic injustices through a personal lens. Like the British director’s work, _Kentucky Route Zero is rooted in long conversations and everyday details, seething with quiet fury about the ongoing abuse of power.

In his review for Vice, Austin Walker examined how the game explores this pervasive capitalism, from the shame it instills in those who fall outside its narrow metric of success to the way the system mediates death. Occupy a space down the pecking order, as Kentucky Route Zero’s characters do, and you’ll slide closer to the grave, lacking access to basic amenities such as clean drinking water, medical care, and safe transit. “Whose homes can survive a disaster?” wrote Walker. “And whose fault is it when these things go wrong?”

Set in Kentucky mostly at night and mostly underground, its creators describe the game as magical realist but it is both more unsettling and mundane than the genre’s literary touchstone, Gabriel García Márquez’s 1967 novel One Hundred Years of Solitude. Ghosts, memories, and money haunt almost every scene like the eeriness cultural theorist Mark Fisher described as a “failure of absence or a failure of presence .” As Conway, Ezra, and the other drifters venture deeper into the game’s cavernous spaces, they seem to discover Fisher’s “underside of contemporary capital’s mundane gloss.” Homes and workplaces lie abandoned, people forgotten, and a noose-like debt ensnares almost anyone who comes into contact with the game’s most antagonist-like force, the Consolidated Power Company.

Jake Elliott: Ben and I both moved out of Chicago during that time. I'm living in Elizabethtown, Kentucky, and Ben's in Los Angeles. I've got two kids.

VICE: It’s been almost seven years since Act I came out. Obviously a lot has changed over this period, which I’d like to get into, but what changes occured in your own lives?

This interview, which took place over a video call with all three Cardboard Computer members, has been edited for brevity and clarity.

Elliott: The story and the work itself have remained compelling. We've done a lot of formal experimentation over the course of the game. Even though it's still this point and click, multiple choice dialogue structure, we've found ways to experiment and keep the work growing. For my part, writing the dialogue, in each episode or interlude there's a moment or scene which undermines the formal vocabulary we had already. In Act IV, we added one scene where there's two conversations happening at once that affect each other. In Act V, the cat's dreams about the town, or however you want to look at those little vignettes, have the hypertext treatment.

Tamas Kemenczy: I'm still into the subject matter. I'm less compelled by the rigidity of the art style which we established. I was very stubborn about sticking to it.

There was the book, Hillbilly Elegy, that was sort of about how the Trump moment was a consequence of the moral failure of the people living here. That was a pretty big thing. For us, in the late part of the game, around when we were working on Act V, this other book came out, What You're Getting Wrong About Appalachia by Elizabeth Catte. She's a public historian and it’s a rebuttal to Hillbilly Elegy and that way of historicizing this area. So there was this moment where Kentucky and Appalachia were in the media, in this bizarre twisted way, for the wrong reasons, and then a lot of people from this area were writing their own history and countering that. There was a lot of really inspiring work coming out of the last few years, writing about the radical history.

Elliott: Certainly we were living through the consequences of the financial stuff that happened in 2008 and 2009. It felt like that was really pervasive and really everybody was dealing with the consequences of that. What's happening now also largely feels like a consequence of that. Kentucky, Appalachia, and this part of the country — when Trump was elected there were a lot of people in the country eager to scapegoat the working class of the south and Appalachia specifically as being responsible which is ridiculous. It was always a skewed, weird way to rationalise what happened with that election.

When the game first emerged in 2013, it felt like a really timely exploration of how economic forces impact people and their communities. Then, when the prospect of a Trump victory was looming a few years later, the game felt like it resonated with the deluge of parachute journalism into what writers referred to as “ Trump country .” What are your memories of the first few years of the 2010s?

Babbitt: It's a different world. That's not to say there wasn't a precedent for what's happening now during the Obama era, but it feels pretty different to live in this country in 2020 than it did in 2008.

Kemenczy: I remember when it ended — the streets had no cars in them, and from facade to facade, it was just filled with people — this mass exodus leaving Grant Park. It really did feel like this cultural moment.

Babbitt: I was in college so that first part of the decade was turning 21 and being in school in Chicago. Youth, really. Not having any idea what the fuck is going on or how to do the things I was trying to do. One of the biggest things that happened for me was meeting Jake and Tamas and starting to work on this project. It was also the first time I was old enough to vote in a presidential election. Obama was first term so it was the optimism of youth combined with this cultural optimism, which I had never experienced.

Elliott: I think my perspective has certainly changed. I've learned a lot about the historical forces that have set things up the way they are. I live near Elizabethtown. I'm not in the city limits so I can't actually vote on city matters but that's where my office is. I've found that Elizabethtown — it's thirty to forty thousand so a small city — has a pretty suburban feel. The politicians are all pretty conservative and I've gotten a better understanding for what is the suburban conservative more than the rural conservative. We have a lot of work to do in the suburbs. It's pretty frustrating how intransigent some local politicians are but there's some really great politicians in Kentucky, too, especially at the state politics level.

Jake, your partner is from Kentucky and you moved there in 2014, right? Can you talk to me a little about your experience of the state and how it’s changed in the following years.

How have you familiarized yourself with local politics? Have you become involved in any community initiatives?

Elliott: A little bit. I've gone and participated in protests and mostly familiarized myself just from following it more closely. Hardin County is the name of the county I live in. There's a group called Heartland Progressive Alliance I follow and watch for different opportunities to be involved in protests. But it's a small city so when I have gone to a protest here, I get to see which of my neighbors is on which side, which is sometimes a little distressing.

Is it ever surprising?

Elliott: Sure. When I lived in Chicago it was a little bit more of a given that people that I was working with or working alongside at different spaces were gonna be politically progressive or at least liberal. And here, it's not so much of a given we agree on stuff, even if we get along professionally.

When I read Hillbilly Elegy , it seemed like this strangely flattened version of reality. On the one hand, it’s an often vivid personal account but on the other, Appalachia appears as this almost entirely white monoculture. There’s a wonderful image in Act V which feels almost diametrically opposed to such a depiction. Did the popularity of Hillbilly Elegy and related media impact how you wanted to depict communities in Kentucky Route Zero ?