The finale of Kentucky Route Zero was released this past January, and even though it's been nearly 10 months since I played it, I can't stop thinking about it.
At the end of the 9-year-long (the game was released in five acts, spanning sometimes 4+ years between them) journey, when the Mucky Mammoth takes the characters across the Echo River, the party finally arrives at Dogwood Drive, which is a small clearing where no roads lead in or out. It is also ground zero of the Elkhorn Mine disaster that preceded the events of the game. The area is still flooded, and there are piles of dead horses (horses were allowed to roam free in the town and the people living there considered them residents) everywhere.
The last major event of the game, as the party unloads the contents of Conway's truck into the house, is a funeral. The player, taking the role of a housecat, listens in on conversations between the party that just arrived and the people who already live there, and is finally called over to witness the funeral for the horses that have died, but, it is obvious to everyone, both the characters and the player, that the funeral isn't really just for the horses who drowned, but also for everyone who was lost or displaced in the wake of the Elkhorn Mine disaster, or fell into debt to either the Hard Times Distillery (which is what happens to Conway in Act III, and the bar patrons in The Entertainment) or the Consolidated Power Company (like Dr Truman of Act II).
I am not really giving enough information about what KR0 is, I know, but, as we teeter on the edge of another coronavirus spike, it's an experience literally everyone should have.
The reason why this beautiful, poetic, and ultimately bleak game has me captivated, long after I have finished it, is that through it, I am thinking about how we are going to account for this tragedy, the one we are facing in real life right now.
I can't help but think that this game, a magical realist adventure game (more a stage play than a game) about ruthless and terrifying capitalist exploitation by faceless corporations against ordinary people, is directly connected to how we are dealing with coronavirus--or not--as, as of September, eight million Americans have plunged into poverty because the government failed to pass a second stimulus bill to keep people in their homes, and over 220,000 Americans are dead as we head into the winter.
The game serves, ultimately, as a reminder that America was built on tragedy and devastation. Much of what happens in the game is built upon real historical events and circumstances, from the Whiskey Rebellion, to the use of scrip, and the unmitigated greed of corporations outside the reach of government. It's a story about how people try--and often fail--to find life after what seems like divine catastrophe, and it speaks directly to this moment as we face multiple threats--economic, political, and biological--to our lives.
The funeral at the end of the game makes me wonder if and how we will account for all of the lives, not just killed by the virus, but who, like the denizens of the Zero, were destroyed and displaced directly because society preferred to make huge, unnecessary, and wasteful sacrifices of human beings.
