Maybe I didn’t see it because the landscape was so different. It would be facile to say that 2011 was a simpler time (whether for video games or for the world), but I think it is fair to say that for many, it seemed simpler. I was certainly a simpler (if still well-intentioned) critic. So when Cardboard Computer launched the Kickstarter for the game on January 7, 2011—a full year before the massive, multi-million dollar Double Fine Adventure and Wasteland 2 campaigns ushered in crowdfunding as a common fixture of gaming in the 2010s—maybe I just didn’t expect much from something so humble. After all, it only raised $8,583, and I’d been taught that budget and quality were, if not causal, at least correlative.

In retrospect I don’t know how I didn’t see that Kentucky Route Zero would be a game fundamentally about capitalism. Or, that’s not right, exactly, because there are many elements of capitalism that are absent from the game—the rich people which last year’s Disco Elysium skewer loudly, directly, and repeatedly, for example, barely appear in KRZ. Instead, it’s probably more fair to say that Kentucky Route Zero is a game about what capitalism does to people, how it turns them into fuel and into highway both, so that it can spread further and further, devouring more and more along the way.

There are light spoilers for the previously released Kentucky Route Zero Acts I-IV below. If you want to know nothing else, know that whether you have been playing this game episodically during it’s now seven year long release period or if you have been waiting for the full package, it has my highest recommendation. Also, content warning for discussion of dentistry .

From late 2010 until mid 2015, I was living in Canada, attending the University of Western Ontario’s Media Studies program, and making something like $15k a year as teaching assistant plus, eventually, some extra cash from freelance writing. Which meant that not only was the high price of fixing a chipped tooth ( yes, even in Canada ) out of my range, even Kentucky Route Zero’s original, $40 Kickstarter ask wasn’t something I could easily fit into my budget. Which was a bummer, because Cardboard Computer’s pitch was laser targeted at me.

In what might seem like an unrelated thread, but which, I promise, has deep relevance to Kentucky Route Zero, this was also about the time I fell down the stairs of the townhouse I rented a tiny room in, chipping my right permanent mandibular first molar, tooth #30 per the Universal Numbering System. (“Although it is named the ‘universal numbering system,’” Wikipedia tells me , “it is also called the ‘American system’ as it is only used in the United States.” Hmm.)

I was right, but what I couldn’t predict was that not only would these naive hopes of younger self be met, they’d actually be exceeded. Put simply: Kentucky Route Zero is greater than whatever buzzwords are used to sell it. It makes me want to write with the fervor of naivete, yet rewards serious engagement. It’s a masterful American tragedy that avoids the cheapest tendencies of games like it, while leveraging techniques distinct and unique to gaming as a medium. Nine years after it was announced, the journey has been worth every day. I doubt I could be happier with it.

In the face of the Call of Duty-driven FPS ascendancy, I’d become someone who demanded more from games. As a young writer with an underdeveloped critical toolkit and the overconfidence that often comes along with that, I could just tell that Cardboard Computer’s pitch for KRZ was promising the sorts of things that I was desperate to see more of, and which I hoped the then-burgeoning “indie boom” would bring.

Though the game looks much different than in its original Kickstarter video, many of the basics laid out in the campaign remain the same: Kentucky Route Zero follows the journey of Conway, an antique deliveryman who would travel the roads (visible and invisible) of Kentucky, meet some memorable friends, and make one last delivery before his employer shut down shop. Not only did the developers use the words “magical realism,” a literary genre I barely knew (yet was convinced I loved), they also described the game as a “slow-paced” adventure, “focusing on exploring new environments and talking with new people.”

Limits & Demonstrations features three of KRZ’s recurring background characters, Emily, Ben, and Bob, visiting a museum of conceptual and interactive art. Playing as the trio—or maybe it’s more fair to say in league with the trio—you wander from exhibit to exhibit, choosing dialog options and determining if and how the three friends interpret and play around with what’s on display. I write “in league with” because even in this free interlude, it was clear that KRZ had a peculiar understanding of player agency and control.

When Kentucky Route Zero: Act I released two years after its successful Kickstarter, its $7 standalone price tag still seemed like more than I could afford for something reportedly so short. But a month later, Cardboard Computer released Limits & Demonstrations, the first of the game’s free “Interludes” which bridge the game’s major acts together and offer some additional backstory and context for the events to come. (These interludes are now built directly into the game, and though you could skip from Act to Act, they should absolutely be played as you progress through the story.)

This isn’t a game where you explore BioWare-style dialog trees, exhausting options and repeatedly returning to “root” topics. Instead, you make constant forward progress, with little transparency as to what selections are being tracked and no way (bar save-scumming, replaying, or digging around in the game’s files) to see what another choice might lead you to.

Instead of embodying a single character, Kentucky Route Zero casts you as a sort of co-author to the game’s own writers. Though you do directly move a character around an environment, a la most adventure games, which character you control often changes from scene to scene, and sometimes even within a given sequence. Additionally, from the game’s first act through its finale, you bounce between interlocutors in the game’s many conversations, choosing which character will speak and which line will be said. Conway, the aforementioned deliveryman, might kick off a conversation with a beleaguered and verbose bureaucrat, but you might choose to be Shannon Márquez, a TV repairwoman and Conway’s traveling companion, to end it with a brusque response.

Today, as more players are familiar with story-driven adventure games and visual novels, this might not seem so striking. But in 2013, it contrasted sharply with both the popular BioWare model and especially with Telltale’s The Walking Dead (released a year prior to great acclaim), which signposted “important” choices directly with the now commonly parodied so-and-so will remember that text appearing directly on screen.

I didn’t realize yet, but Kentucky Route Zero was winding up to punch me in the nose for thinking this way.

Eventually I broke down and bought the whole game, all at once. Things would be a little tighter that month, but it would be worth it. I’d just have to be a little more responsible with my cash, pack a few more lunches, buy a couple less coffees. I’d be more responsible.

Even in the brief Limits & Demonstrations, I was never quite sure when one of my decisions “meant” something. Or rather, what KRZ would come to teach me was that player choice doesn’t need to be flagged, cataloged, and externalized-into-grand-setpiece-reveal in order to contain meaning. Which is probably why I replayed L&D over and over, trying to understand what it was doing, and why it was so compelling.

As you drive around the stark black-and-white map of a few of Kentucky’s southern counties, a pair of text-only vignettes feature Conway visiting the shuttered offices of a local energy co-ops, which have been pushed out of business by the ubiquitous Consolidated Power Co. Now, their conference rooms walls have rotted away and filled with glowing fungus, or have been turned into encampments for those made homeless (whether by Consolidated or the then-recent subprime mortgage crisis, who could say).

I said at the very top that I don’t know how I didn’t see how Kentucky Route Zero is all about capitalism and what it does to people because, upon revisiting it, Act I is dotted with telltale signals. Even before you make it to the failed coal mine of the chapter’s striking climax, Conway and Shannon visit one location after another, each touched by the broken promises of a system powered by those broken promises.

Maybe I didn’t see them because I simply didn’t trust that KRZ was actually committed to these themes instead of just using signifiers diluted by their regular presence in the pop culture palette. A dystopian power company? Sure, why not, toss it in. A mine ruined by poor safety regulations? Standard fare.

But when an accident at the end of Act I became the focal point of Act 2, which is centered on the accessibility (and cost) of medical care, things started to click into place. And by the time Act 3 came out in 2014, two things were clear to me.

The first was that Kentucky Route Zero was a game about debt and shame, in the many shapes and sizes those things take.

In what I think is the best of the game’s interludes, The Entertainment, you both watch and participate in the staging of an experimental play about a struggling bar and the struggling people who work and drink in it. Just before the play’s final scene, one of the characters—a young woman distraught over her parent’s floundering lives and her own role in the Moloch-machine of capitalism—tells that her boss has invented “a new financial technology,” “a new type of debt” she clarifies when prodded. What kind?

PEARL: You know what we do at the pawn shop? "Secured loans." We don't buy used goods, we take personal property as collateral on a loan. Then if you don't pay your loan, we sell your stuff.

HARRY: Sure, I get that.

PEARL: It works for people who couldn't get loans otherwise. I guess. Now Hardin has this new idea. He calls it a "payday advance." But it's just a short-term, unsecured loan with a wicked interest rate. There's no filtering. Most who borrow can't keep up. Then he has this big pile of debts with big returns on paper, and he can sell those debts to a bank.

HARRY: Huh. Who's borrowing like that?

PEARL: Who do you think? When Joe put me in charge of it? The only dark-skinned clerk in the whole shop?