One of the more well-known cultural aspects of the South, as well as Appalachia, is the comparatively slow pace of life. KR0 is a slow game, often taking multiple acts to expand on ideas or letting other ideas and characters fade in and out along the way. The primary story of the game — Conway making his final delivery before retirement to an address on Route Zero, and his journey to that ambiguous destination — is only occasionally addressed beyond Act I, instead giving way to the stories of the people you meet along the way. This measured patience may turn some players off, but that’s the entire point — life in the country is slow. To move any faster would make the game feel almost disingenuous.

Not only does the game take its time with unraveling its narrative knots, it often does so in very abstract, disorienting ways. KR0 is a game with many stories going on at once over the course of its five (currently four released) acts, and these stories rarely end with a satisfying conclusion, or a conclusion at all. You enter the lives of these characters at various points, get to know them, and move on. Sometimes you’ll enter at a crucial point in their story — other times, you’ll enter long after the story has ended. On the Zero, you’re just another traveler, not the most important person that’s ever traveled the route. Conway and his friends are only brief side-characters, passing by on the way to their own ends, occasionally stopping to enjoy the scenery and help a singer and her bandmate get to a performance on time (as much as “on-time” means for those that live on the Zero).

Which brings us to the other thing Kentucky Route Zero excels at: making the player feel like an interloper. In every scenario Conway and co. find themselves in, you always feel like you’ve stumbled onto some folks that don’t want to be bothered and don’t really care whether you help them or not, but might appreciate the gesture.

Butting in to help others regardless of whether or not they want help is also part of a pretty well-known component of rural/Appalachian culture: we’re stubborn. Often, many people won’t ask for help, but will freely give it even without being asked. This contradictory attitude is a pretty fitting microcosm of Appalachian culture — many of the beliefs of rural folk are contradictory, ,and don’t always make sense when explained to people that haven’t experienced the culture up close.

Same, kid. Same.

And yet, while being so good at making me feel at home, Kentucky Route Zero also frequently feels completely foreign to me. I find myself rapidly oscillating between understanding the game on an intensely personal level and feeling like I’m playing something totally different. Comparisons to Twin Peaks are fairly played out by this point, but I honestly can’t think of a closer analog to Zero. Everything, down to the culture and the pacing, feels perfectly fitting, and yet, I frequently wonder if I don’t really understand this game at all, or if I’m even supposed to understand.

This off-feeling has only ever happened to me in one other scenario that I can think of — it’s the same feeling I get when I go back home to West Virginia, after primarily living in D.C. for the past year or so. Seeing the “Wild and Wonderful” welcome signs on the interstate always fills me with a warm, fuzzy feeling, but commonly that feeling is followed by a sense that I no longer belong here, that this isn’t really my home anymore.

Driving through Charleston and seeing the lottery building, the old Civic Center, the Kanawha River — they’re the same sights I’ve seen for almost all my life when passing through the city, but they no longer feel like “mine.” It’s like leaving home permanently took a part of me that I’m never going to get back in the process, and suddenly I’ve become Conway — just another traveler, on my way to somewhere only important to me.