Kentucky Route Zero review – love and magic in the mundane

The final instalment of this cult classic brings tragedy tinged with redemption

Six years in the telling, Kentucky Route Zero's story is unusually low stakes, especially for a video game, a medium that typically operates in the twin registers of hyperbole and hysteria. You play, mostly, as Conway, a delivery man working for the owner of an antique shop on the brink of closure, tasked with making the business's final delivery. Split into five chapters, the first of which was released in 2013, and the last arriving now alongside a box-set edition that brings the story into a unified release, the game sends Conway on a winding journey across the state of Kentucky, an item of furniture snugly secured in the back of his truck. By the start of this final chapter, while Conway has withdrawn somewhat from the foreground, his task remains overarchingly urgent: find that house and make the ultimate delivery.

To state the game's goal in such straightforward terms is to do the expedition on which the game takes its players a disservice. Described by its three-man, art-minded development team as a "magical realist adventure game", Kentucky Route Zero is as elegiac as it is prosaic. It combines the mundane and the mystical to create an atmosphere that sits somewhere along the wispy continuum between a Samuel Beckett play and a David Lynch mini-series. You start chapter five, for example, in the role of an eavesdropping cat, listening in on conversations between residents of a recently flooded town as they discuss everything from the death of small businesses, to the appropriate depth of hole one should dig in order to bury a recently drowned horse.