#but I've read too many articles about dying midwestern towns not to recognize what was happening there

[notbecauseofvictories]

Theoretically, this should be a very long, involved meta and the title would be “Kentucky Route Zero and the End of the Road” or something equally ridiculous. I imagine I’d quote Wendell Berry liberally. However, I am not particularly good at meta, and definitely not about video games---so instead you get this, an elegy for the one and only video game I love and how I am somehow both furious with it and think it did a good thing.

As a bit of background: I don’t like....games. I’m just not a fan of cards, dice, boards, joysticks, or any and all permutations of sportsball, war, and antitrust violations. However, there are two games that serve as the exception to the rule: my annual scrabble match with my grandmother and Kentucky Route Zero, a point-and-click from Cardboard Company. 

It counts as a video game only in the technical sense that it uses “video” and is sort of a “game.” Otherwise, it is mostly poetry and ruminations about rural American life, journeys, transience, and debt. 

I love it an unreasonable amount.

[ spoilers for Act V ahead ]

Going into Act V, I admit there were things I wanted. I wanted Conway back. I wanted Johnny and Junebug to de facto adopt one (1) human child and one (1) giant eagle who is inexplicably the human child’s brother. I wanted Shannon to have closure with Weaver. If Consolidated Power Co. was somehow razed to the ground and everyone’s debts erased and liminal, magical realist Kentucky freed from the looming specter of corporate interest, you wouldn’t hear me complaining. I wanted, to be blunt about it, resolution.

Act V gave me exactly none of the above. 

And so, my first reaction was a kind of aggrieved fury. How dare Cardboard Company not give me (and these characters, who they made me love and want nice things for) a proper ending? Am I just supposed to let Conway drift away into debt and servitude? Am I supposed to forget that Junebug and Johnny are a bit ambivalent about bringing someone new into their dynamic? Shannon is just supposed to---supposed to what, go on? Not knowing what happened to Weaver? Not seeing justice done for her parents, or anything more than a memorial floating in Echo River?

Even worse, playing the game with all the spliced-in extras makes me care about Emily, Ben, and Bob, Ron and Rita, and all the residents of that place where the roads don’t go and the ghost of a girl haunts the public access studio. All those people whose entire lives are washed away in the course of a night, forced to decide whether to stay and rebuild what can’t be entirely reconstructed or leave for some other, equally strange place.

None of it is goddamn fair, and when “THE END” showed in that white serif font I was so unutterably angry that I had to stand up and pace around my apartment until the emotion wore away.

But beyond that first shock, I’m not sure where Kentucky Route Zero ended up is...actually bad. When I first played through Acts I-III, I described it as a game “about things that are Gone, and things that are Gone-but-still-with-us, like families and history and debt.” I don’t think that’s incorrect---if anything, Act V reaffirmed this as a central theme. Act V said, very clearly, that things change, people leave, debt is sold, towns give up the ghost (or are already occupied by them) and survival is definitely more fraught and complicated than you might imagine. However...things very rarely go. Even the Neighbors don’t leave, when they are memorialized and the inhabitants of a nameless town (living and dead) come together to mourn their passing. 

It’s not death but it is also, still, death, because change (things going away, other things coming into being in their place) is always a sort of death.

Which unfortunately means I was right. At the heart of Kentucky Route Zero is transience and memory. refracted through a hundred different lenses---some good, some bad. You have the Museum of Dwellings taking people’s homes out of context and “remembering” them, the Bureau of Reclaimed Spaces kicking out the congregation to turn a cathedral into office space, and neatly removing the center of gravity from their world. (Doolittle laughs about how Consolidated Power cheated Earl out of his beehives.) On the other hand: Will is the living embodiment of the Echo’s history, recipient of unknown persons’ first memories. Every time she encounters someone who also remembers Weaver, Shannon melts. Conway remembers Ira and Charlie and the truck, the furniture shed, even if Lysette doesn’t. Memorials---everything from official monuments to discarded trash and gravestones, signs, and broadcasts---play a significant role in the unfolding arc of the story. 

Things that are gone, but not gone.

Which means that while I might feel deprived of a happy ending, an easy ending, the ending I was given was...right. Watching June and Johnny go back and forth about Ezra, as Shannon and Emily waver about whether to stay or go was real, and honest. Knowing that nothing could be done, really, to save Conway from the debt he incurred and the job he consented to, other than finish his delivery was right. There is nothing to be done for the Pueblo de Nada, for the Neighbors or the dead or the Gone, other than to recognize that they were there first. Other than to remember them, in their fullness.

(I kept thinking about the folktale, about how Solomon in his wisdom was asked for those words that would make a grieving man happy, and a joyous man sad. According to legend, he sent the ring engraved with the phrase: "And this, too, shall pass away.")

At the end of Act V, our heroes gather in a house that is not a house, which looks both forwards and backwards, and is full of music, or maybe a workshop, and they watch the sun set. And it wasn’t the ending that I wanted, but maybe it was the one deserved.

We are not saints, but we have kept our appointment. How many people can boast as much?

#this is....kind of my feelings? trying to figure out how I could be so incredibly moved by something that also made me angry #but I've read too many articles about dying midwestern towns not to recognize what was happening there #not to hope (as johnny and june hope as shannon hopes as those who choose to stay hope) that memory and renewal is enough #kentucky route zero #spoilers herein