I watched the video essay "The Mysterious Grief of Kentucky Route Zero." Incredible work, and highly recommend watching it whether you have played the game or not. It goes act by act exploring the theme, so you'll get the basic plot. I don't think this game can be spoiled, though, in the way Shakespeare plays can't be spoiled. Knowing the story already helps you understand exactly how the story is occurring in minute detail, which is the real point of the work.
It took her about 8 months to make because this game runs as deep as Appalachian caverns. We joke on here about "this is the thing that radicalized me," but you really can hear how the more she dove into understaffing this game, its literary/philosophical references, and the regional history of class warfare it drew deeply from, the angrier she got about the real system around us. Which is exactly what political art aims to do. Kentucky Route Zero wants you to go out and fight the bad guys, but it's not dragons or villains within the game, it's fightin for your rights against corporations and the corrupt politicians they own. The game is about what happens when youare so worn down you don't fight.
Then Hurricane Helene happened in the middle of making it and illustrated every single theme of the game so starkly that she says outright that it shook her out of tragedy observer mode into trying to do something, anything, for the real people affected. It helped her identify the sense of distant helplessness that society had trained her to feel was sad but inevitable. I hope she continues her journey into what is most effective in this fight, especially since the very 2024 election she ends on probably crushed her own optimism.
This game very much follows Octavia Butler's "A Few Rules For Predicting The Future." In short that we can only understand the trajectory of where we're going if we truely embrace understanding where we've been. If the story keeps repeating in history, but no one's paying attention, just say it again plainly in a compelling story where people are more likely to hear it. And maybe it will take time and their own observations to realize that the magic was just another way of showing the realism, but it's all true.
Kentucky Route Zero is to me specifically about the grief of capitalist exploitation. How the entire system is a scam to trap as many people as possible in hopeless servitude to the few. Make as many indentured servants as possible. Make them understand on a spiritual level that they have no worth with which to pay off the debt of being alive except for their labor. (The Trust in the Midst explores the same thing.) That we aren't living things, we're skeleton robots controlled by The Company to do with as they see fit. One day reality comes and washes it all away. And those left have to decide what they rebuild next.
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