On driving a truck full of antiques with no licence
In Kentucky Route Zero, taking the long road is worth it
The first time I tried learning how to drive, my hands hadn’t even touched the wheel before I quit. I sat through two theory classes, watched several grainy videos of car accidents, and tapped out.
Since then, I’ve had little cause to consider myself a driver, until I was entrusted with a truck bearing Lysette's Antiques, and told to make a delivery to 5 Dogwood Drive. The vehicle stood outside a gas station, rumbling gently as it waited for me to enter.
Such is the premise of Kentucky Route Zero, a point-and-click game released over a period of seven years in four acts. You start as a character named Conway, a delivery driver for Lysette’s, after reaching Equus Oils in the dead of night. Among its many mysteries, the game’s use of magical realism to explore class, overwork and exhaustion have been the subject of immense praise by critics. In a bid to avoid spoilers before I started, I had no idea that it involved driving.
Driving simulators usually bring to mind the likes of Mario Kart, GTA, or programmes dedicated to actual driving instruction. The broad appeal is that as a player, you hold the wheel and steer, swerving to avoid any number of projectiles and obstacles to speed to your destination. I have categorically failed at enjoying many of these, and so the thought of taking the wheel in KRZ brought some unease.
Yet the game’s sparse, immaculately designed mechanics of moving from place to place have felt truer to what I imagine the freedom of a long drive feels like: a genuinely open road, with little stopping you from ambling gently from street to street. In KRZ, you begin your journey by opening up a simple 2D map, consisting of snaking white lines that carve out streets against pitch blackness. You’re represented by a little geometric tire, which rolls through roads uninterrupted until it finds a landmark, which you can elect to stop at or move past.
Given that it’s point-and-click, the game could easily have justified some kind of teleportation system, but I’m so glad it didn’t. By carefully handling its minimal visual detail and a handful of key mechanics, driving didn’t feel like an anxious rush to a destination to fulfill a quest.
Instead of clear, clinical instructions, the game’s directions have personality – as Conway, you are told to find “that ugly tree that’s always on fire”. The experience is also guided by sound; an errant crash in the distance could guide you on a different quest altogether. These could range from entire cinematic scenes, told through text, to small observations, like a swathe of dragonflies across your windshield. This encouragement of organic discovery is a satisfying midpoint between full driving simulators, and not depicting travel altogether.
KRZ’s driving mechanics are set against a dark, melancholy aesthetic, but still maintain the game’s absurd, magical realist streak. I have such bad spatial awareness that this might be the only way I know how to find things: by looking for entire trees aflame, that never stop burning.
Of course, this isn’t to knock games in which the heft, practicalities, and pure mechanics of travel comprise much of the experience itself. One of my favourite games to watch is Sea of Thieves, where most of the gameplay involves figuring out how to sail your ship across beautifully rendered turquoise seas and a brilliant sun, from hoisting the sails and figuring out wind directions, to steering and dropping anchors. Gamers have also used travel mechanics as a means of subversive storytelling, like envisioning yourself as a postal worker making deliveries lawfully in GTA, or simply abandoning the delivery altogether in American Truck Simulator.
For now, I have no plans to learn how to operate any type of vehicle in real life. Yet I’m still making my gradual way through the darkened streets of a surrealist Kentucky, to somehow find 5 Dogwood Drive.
Things on my mind this week:
I’m almost done reading Detransition, Baby by Torrey Peters and it is Wild. It is reminding me how much I enjoy reading about/temporarily inhabiting a world in which queer and trans people’s experiences and psyches are at the absolute centre.
If you’re reading this, thank you and sorry, maybe? I wrote this essay a while ago and even then, it wasn’t particularly timely. But I enjoyed putting it to paper/pixels and I hope someone else will enjoy it too.