Kentucky Route Zero's final act will be out at the end of the month

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I've only played the first act of Kentucky Route Zero. I liked it an awful lot—I raved about it in a review you might still find floating around out there somewhere—but I don't like episodic releases, and so after it was finished I decided to put the whole thing aside until I could play it all in one big, bizarre narrative hallucination. I did not expect to have to wait seven years, but here we are in 2020, and Cardboard Computer has now, finally, announced that the fifth and final act will be out on January 28.

Kentucky Route Zero is a slow, dreamlike amble through the magical back roads of the titular state, where some things happen and some things don't, and sometimes it's hard to tell the difference. It's remarkably immersive—I could almost feel the humidity of the sultry summer night in act 1—and spins its tale slowly, so that you might not notice the shift from "strange" to "surreal" as you and your dog attempt to deliver a piece of antique furniture to an address that nobody is sure actually exists.

"There are no explicit puzzles here—except for the meaning of the things you experience along the way or riddles proffered by your occasional companions," we wrote in our 84% review. "Characters fade from reality like apparitions, a radio booms out choral music in a deserted church, a burning tree marks a turning along the highway, and an old tannoy pings the depths of a disused mine, stirring memories of a forgotten disaster."

Kentucky Route Zero is available on Steam, GOG, Humble, and Itch.io. If you'd like to get a sense of what it's all about, sort of, Un Pueblo de Nada is a production of the fictional Echo River community, funded in part by a court-ordered grant from the Consolidated Power Company—a demo of sorts.

Andy Chalk
US News Lead

Andy has been gaming on PCs from the very beginning, starting as a youngster with text adventures and primitive action games on a cassette-based TRS80. From there he graduated to the glory days of Sierra Online adventures and Microprose sims, ran a local BBS, learned how to build PCs, and developed a longstanding love of RPGs, immersive sims, and shooters. He began writing videogame news in 2007 for The Escapist and somehow managed to avoid getting fired until 2014, when he joined the storied ranks of PC Gamer. He covers all aspects of the industry, from new game announcements and patch notes to legal disputes, Twitch beefs, esports, and Henry Cavill. Lots of Henry Cavill.

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