What it do Chopheads. This is JXVD in the Pork Chop Express here to do my favorite thing, talk about Video Games. I know what you’re thinking, “Games? I can’t bother, I’m far too busy discussing the relative merits of Russian Suprematism and how the art movement was influenced by the creators’ social standing in 1910s Russian society.” Don’t worry, I’ve got you covered in this series known as “Games for Art Nerds.” Almost everything talked about here will not require any manual dexterity, and absolutely everything discussed should be playable on even the shittiest computer.

Kentucky Route Zero

We start today with maybe the most highfalutin Art Game™ that is on my list. How do you feel about Faulkner or Beckett? Do you want to play a game that references Magritte? How about Colossal Cave Adventure? Do you like constant adventures in formalism? Great, me too. But the real trick of KRZ is that it uses those elements to heighten and abstract an elegant narrative about a group of individuals trying to navigate living in this capitalist hellscape. The first character you play as is Conway, a man who needs to make one final delivery of antiques to 5 Dogwood Drive, a place that can only be found by driving along the Zero, the mysterious highway that goes through the caves of Kentucky.

Separated into 5 acts that take anywhere from 30 minutes to 2 hours alongside 4 intermissions, KRZ is a pleasantly weighty game that is easily broken down into smaller chunks to digest. There isn’t a perfect way to describe the gameplay, but there are generally speaking, two actions to perform: walking around, and choosing how a conversation will go. The conversations are the main part of the game, a place where you script and choose which poetic response you think will add most to the scene, or is most appropriate for a character, or is the funniest. But this is a limited view of what KRZ is, it at times is a strange vector graphics walkabout, a riverboat ride with a greek chorus of folk singers, or an interactive music video. This game is an exploration of forms used to tell a graceful, beautiful story.

This is the first game on the Art Nerd list for two reasons. The first is that it has artistic ambitions and is unafraid to show them to you. The second is that it isn’t a game that is possible to be “bad” at. If you’ve only looked at games from afar you may be under the impression that you can win or lose, succeed or fail, but this just isn’t true. The only thing to do here is live through an experience.

If this sounds good to you and you want to play it. There are a few ways to do so. If you or someone you live with owns a console made after 2013, there is a strong likelyhood you can buy it on there. If you own a windows device or an xbox, you can purchase a subscription to a thing called Xbox Gamepass for 1$ for the first month. Gamepass works for computers and xboxes, there are two versions so if you switch you can continuously only pay a dollar per month. I’ve done this for over a year at this point. Otherwise, you can just buy it on Steam or Switch.

If this sounds good to you and you don’t want to play it, there are longplays without any commentary that exist. I’ve included a link to one with a timestamp of one of my favorite sections of the game, it is a minor spoiler but also this part fucking rules.