Perhaps one of the most valuable goods in the entertainment industry is the secret. It doesn’t matter, big or small, it is the very bait of the interest for the brain, having seized on which he will not calm down until it draws a picture of its alleged unraveling, and will eagerly wait for a new portion of information, which will complement or destroy it.
However, the popularity of the goods attracts scammers, despicable illusionists that, having become very high, they clean their pockets, leading for years through labyrinths of smoke and mirrors. Indeed, at the very basic level, the secret is nothing more than a focus: the action, which contradicts our established idea of the world.
However, even the most skilled magical trick will always turn out to be only a trick, and not a manifestation of forces unknown to a person.
The story of one deception
It’s scary to think that a mysterious story Kentucky Route Zero It began still in January 2011 with an extremely suspicious kikstarter of the campaign. For some ridiculous $ 6,500, bacers promised to release the first episode of a mystical trip to 12 fantastic locations in the fall of the same year, where we will meet many amazing characters and help six lost souls.
A simple trailer for a rude-entertained platformer of Advanchura in the atmosphere of the rural south of the United States has lost between the century of 19 and XXM was attached to the above.
Looking around 2020, it becomes clear that it was, perhaps not 100% intended, but the deception, not the most terrible, by the standards of the cystarter, but still.
Having demonstrated the agility that has already become familiar to crowdfunding, the first episode was released only in 2013 and had very little in common with the previously shown. We were met by a purebred & Click Advenchur, where the names of the characters and some of their distinguishing features, and key elements of the world remained in the inheritance: like a giant eagle, an old truck and a melancholy-nonsense country. Some kind of connection with more long images from American literature disappeared. We already got somewhere in the dull 70s, difficult time of the oil crisis in the United States and the beginning of the computerization of the bureaucracy.
Bait
Despite the radical changes, the player still tried on the role, albeit a noticeably whitewashed, but the same middle -aged driver, an antique shop employee, on an antique truck that has already become an antique, which was lost by delivering cargo at a strange address. The only way to get there will turn out to be Zero the road that will become inexplicable McGaffin throughout all five episodes.
When still indie, automatically meant pixels Kentucky Route Zero in the course of its verified and rather unique visual style, reminiscent of old adventure like Another World(which was built from flat landfills, flooded with one color), but was already made at a completely different qualitative level. 3D models of characters with a flat render were combined with two -dimensional backgrounds. Like a certain tribute of retro, the smoothing of the picture was absent as an option.
From the trailer that she clumsily hid behind the simple imitation of the Render, no less clumsy animation has nothing left. Each scene Kentucky Route Zero It still looked like art from the category of “best” sites like Behans, and animations, despite the extreme simplicity of models, give them life and character.
An important factor in success among the journalists was its terrifying simplicity: the whole gameplay filed in an uncomplicated text quest with elements of the reduced Point-n-click of Advenchura, from which there was only the opportunity to indicate the character where to go, and to press on the pop-up icons of action. It is impossible to lose, the player chooses only in which direction the narrative is moving.
Actually Kentucky Route Zero The dream of hipster-gim Non-gamstop-Casino so popular in those years: a game-register, a game-who is a game, a game-installation, where there would not be any gamers, difficult to master a mechanic or the very opportunity to get in and falling out of a game stream-only a clean, continuous expirence for intellectuals that do not care about your infantile amusements.
Looking around the mountains of the past years to the first episode, I take off my hat, he was a wonderful bait, for the rusticans, in which the phrase Silent Hill, Twin Peaks, the dead, Jacob’s staircase accelerate the pulse. I had to go through it three times, due to the lack of cloud-storage and he is still beautiful to me so far. You feel like a traveler who stepped on the road full of puzzles, but having gone through which you will become wiser to solve some unshakable secret of being, making your way through the wilds of a prominent English.
I was not the only one under the spell of the first episode, the game with great enthusiasm met the printed-civilian press, giving out an advance awards for design, history, and sometimes entering the best games of the year. After such recognition, keeping the maximum silence, the developers continued to release the episode per year, but the final 5th act, which came out just the other day, had to wait since 2016 and he had set me up the schedule so much that it became the reason for writing this text.
We are taught that the stumbled and repentants need to be forgiven, but experience suggests that it is unlikely that what began with deception can be on the path of correction. If you have something to say to me, who has cooled off the fucker, potential players: do not let yourself be fooled by the treacherous capitalist magicians, in front of you are wolves pretending to be inexperienced and talented Indie developers, they knew how important the first episode of the series and how important it was to instruct the empty framework that the gullible viewer would fill up with his hopes and fantasies.
Do not let yourself be deceived and the assessments of Metacricik and even reviews in Steam, they are based, first of all, on those that will never reach it to the end. This game is disgusting, like a magician pretending to be a psychic-healer. The public carries it in his hands, the dummy blind begins to see, cripples walk, but the terrible deceit of the villain, who is arrogant at the fools, does not cease to be a deception, and you just have to leave with him around the corner, as he turns the same dirty trick that is called “you are too stupid to understand it”. The spell that will make the majority discuss an excellent soundtrack, a pleasant graphics, maybe even some episodes, but not a game in general.
Feeling patience
Starting as a mystical row of a muvi, the game gradually erodes all sorts of plot ties with the tie, turning into a set of various kinds of isolated scenes and mini-stories that they will not have development or logical completion, they are only in the role of focuses, which should cause short-term amazement and forget when they show a new trick.
But there is nothing wrong with that, yes? The attraction from the rooms is not obliged to be somehow narcically connected, the main sin Kentucky Route Zero The fact that it consists of 2/3 (the passage of the game may well take 17 hours) from a dull, unnecessary, unbearable arthouse content.
As an independent short meter of commoner represent? Well, this is a pretentious prolonged nudyatin where nothing happens. This phrase describes at least all the inter -episode inserts, which, as I understand it, should not have become part of the game itself, they were some experiments with the audience, as a play for VR helmets or a game in alternative reality, where it was proposed to call the real telephone number existing only in the game of the company of secret tourism and listen to the information of interest to you.
VR the play is felt just torture, thereby the grandmother’s series, where unremarkable characters reveal what disgusting life they have, the woman is drinking because her husband is cheating, but the other woman is worried that she works in which she works in the microcredit office and she will have to drive her parents with their parents, her parents come to the bar.The skirmish begins … Be it a film, you could just look at the ceiling, closing your ears, you can skip the paragraphs in the book, but here the scene develops only by turning the character’s head and clicking on the speaker. And the developers know how disgusting it is, because a review of the play is played on the side, where it pops up at the very end "… Yes, the theater is not a prison, the audience is free to leave when they want to …". Damn post -struggle bastards.
This example, of course, is the exceptional degree of bullying in the game, no more the stick is not too much, but it is a mockery of the player, which cannot get pleasure from such interesting it prevails over everything else, starting from the third act. It will not work to criticize a similar approach, because it is one thing when the authors wanted the best, but the lack of experience played a cruel joke, but I’m more sure than the developers Kentucky Route Zero They did this intentionally, and these are my problems that I have no degree in American literature and I don’t understand what the love triangle of immensely boring scientists refers to and their secret because of which they broke up, what the corporation that buys everything around and what the distillery was all around. Constant moaning of characters about debts, including for study and other horrors of capitalism, is the voice of the authors themselves or even in the 70s was the same? Where did the image of a business and independent teenager come from in an Ezra costume ..
If in the entertainment for plebs, such as the cartoons “Rick and Morty”, all kinds of referers are an additional layer above the frame from history, then here the story itself is a weak dashed line between the random people torn from the context of any additional information except the beauty of the form, and without any academic baggage behind them, there is no meaning in them.
The last trick
But everything cannot be as bad as I describe? Yes, because in the third act, the authors were given the last time to give commoners something except the above. There are free Junbag and Johnny robots as a wind that for a short time the stuffiness of debts, alcoholism, too serious teenagers and unsuccessful businessmen are dispersed for a short time. Their music literally blows the roof, and the very idea of the game as a personal story reaches a maximum. Piercing female vocals of a sad melody, magnificent oma david Lynch. And then? And then it is not interesting.
There will be a cold dry plot of the convoy, from the reference book of the plot turns, from a person who has already spit on the created character and the fifth act, created under a clear impression from white threads Life is Strange. The main message of which I personally determined for myself how this horse (or even two horses-developers) was driven to death.
Instead of epitaph
In the distant 2013, this project could become the beginning of an amazing game, but it turned into a draft or a test landfill of smart and talented people that, having lost interest in the brainchild, hit the experiments on the players, clearly realizing that we would hang on the hook, waiting, if not a solid, then at least that has the meaning of the denouement, but no, do not even hope. And something tells me, the fifth act appeared in an even account because there were investments for TV and Switch versions.
In the process of preparing the text, I have repeatedly faced the amazing pedantry of the authors, when even the idea expressed in 2011 finds its embodiment for many years later, although in the format of “anymores” (as an experienced swindler formally observes the contract), so I am sure that for reputed researchers, that every dialogue will have been stored many more focuses that allow you to collect this tedious underwear, butThe overall impression of the game as a refreshing disappointment, they are unlikely to change. After thousands of unnecessary words and attempts, it is diverse to give it to it.
Afterword
P.WITH. Some time ago, hot disputes were conducted whether it is possible to call games art, why the quality of game scenarios is inferior to films and, perhaps,, perhaps, Kentucky Route Zero is the answer to all these snobs acting with the criticism of interactive media. After all, the game whispers condescendingly to every claim: “You are too stupid. It’s stupid to solve my references, culturally alien to catch, which is hidden in the smallest notes of my language, is too primitive to seriously talk about my story … ”
P.P.WITH. I would hardly go the game further than the first episode (the second already seemed boring to me) if it had not been for the recently added localization, but it is essentially worse for the game, lowering the entry barrier, allowing me to go to persons like me.