CO-VIDs: kentucky route zero's terminus

[@JacobGeller]

Glad to have another on team "end a video with This World is Not My Home"

[@umangmalik]

your video convinced me to play Kentucky Route Zero. also, wtf, you two sound basically identical

[@Tuned_Rockets]

i've never played the game (yet), but that song is strangely... amazing.

[@shohoth2775]

I bought that song on itunes after your video

[@lt_alenko]

Whose cover plays at the end here? It sounds great.

[@Hazel-cv5cj]

Big thonk video game boys

[@snowstrobe]

Your teacher's stories were on purpose precisely for memory development. It's a technique popular with child-centred curriculum teachers. Many are concerned with the evidence that humans are losing our ability to remember with each development in recording life. There is evidence that the advent of writing caused a lose of ability to remember esp in story-telling. To combat this, teachers do these ongoing never ending story lines to help students practice the art of remembering. I was a teacher for 20 years, and every Tuesday afternoon I sat with my students and told a rambling story, taking up from where I'd left off the week before, and constantly seeking input form the kids, getting them to remember past characters. They could draw if they wanted but were not allowed to write. Most just closed their eyes. To this day, past students will tell me it is the thing they think back on most from their school experience. One year, the class turned that year's story into a book, kinda defeating my purpose, but it was their idea.

[@brucethedruid]

Books also reinforce "the one true version". In many oral traditions, stories will have several different versions and variants, even within the same culture group.

[@edgewiseass]

I'd like to see this evidence for writing displacing memorization. The idea that ancient pre-literate societies were better at remembering things and their storytellers retold stories with a high degree of precision appears to be a superstition. It's been disproven by study of modern pre-literate societies (such as "lost" tribes that never developed writing); pre-literate storytellers tend to both revise their stories over time (similar to how a comedian refines a bit over the course of a tour) and to tailor their stories to their audience.

[@LeFlamel]

Kids remember weekly tv shows just fine, and that seems to fit your praxis as a teacher to a T.

[@snowstrobe]

@@brucethedruid There is a fair bit of evidence that many of the old Hebrew bible stories were only seen as morality tales, not as factual. Not until they were written down that is.

[@Spottedleaf14]

@@brucethedruid the same goes for music! folk music tends to have different variations, different lyrics, different numbers of verses depending on where someone learned the song but it's still known as the same song, and that's true all over the world. But any tradition that developed representational notation gives rise to singularity.

[@kushegga95]

Missed an opportunity to say Mr Wu's stories had an extended wunivervse.

[@thrownstair]

The WuEU, if you will.

[@juneguts]

i relate to this experience of being locked in a middle that won't end. or shouldn't end. the weeby thing for me to reference would be One Piece. if One Piece actually ends, it's gonna be a different air I'm breathing in the morning.

[@Arrakiz666]

As someone who watched Hunter x Hunter to its completion with a bunch of friends, boy do I relate. In my mind there's a pre-Hunter x Hunter era and a post-Hunter x Hunter era. Nothing will be the same ever again, and it's beautiful.

[@Simon-ed5lx]

@@Arrakiz666 I think the HxH manga is still unfinished, is it not ?

[@Arrakiz666]

@@Simon-ed5lx In the sense that the mangaka writing it suffered a terrible burn-out and is physically incapable of continuing it? Yes, yes it is.

[@statboosts279]

You beat me to it, the world is going to feel very different after the end of one piece. It's been in publication much longer than I've been alive, and eventually, It's gonna feel very different when that 30 year story about pirates isn't being told anymore

[@vfaulkon]

Y'know, I haven't read the One Piece manga for a veeeeeery long time so I don't know if they ever answered 'what is the One Piece?', but maybe...it doesn't matter. The fact that the One Piece exists as this Schrodinger's Treasure - something that may or may not be real until it's observed - may help create a story like Kentucky Route Zero. It inspires people to create these myths and legends. It makes the world just a little more fantastical and unknown. It helps create these kinds of people and adventures that themselves become legendary. You can look at everything Luffy and his crew have done, see how much they've shaped the world and had stories made of them, and see how maybe the true value of the One Piece is in never being found. Because once it's found, the story ends.

[@Dorian_sapiens]

There is something compelling about experiences with art that can never be recreated or experienced the same way again.

[@badflamer]

Deidara agrees

[@Dorian_sapiens]

@@badflamer Sorry, can you explain that reference?

[@enossoares6907]

... and the crowd was left forever intrigued, for they never explained It.

[@gabrote42]

Ghost Trick, Return of the Obra Dinn, Undertale, LoTR (for me), Omori, Outer Wilds, In Stars and Time... gloripus

[@BraninT]

I recall one of mt favorite exchanges in the game is when one of the characters asks you, "Have you ever worked for something your whole life only to have it disappear one day?" And your dialogue choices are: CONRAD: I Worked for an antique shop all my life, and now they're out of business. SHANNON: I run a repair shop I'll be closing down soon. EZRA: My parents got taken away from me. JUNEBUG: NOPE.

[@notaninquisitor7274]

Growing up I would spend 100+ hours playing stuff like Final Fantasy 6 only to accidentally save over my data with another. The first time it happened I felt hollow and sad about not being able to experience more with that specific set of choices. Fortunately, I quickly recovered and became invigorated by starting again. Until I accidentally saved over the file again. Each time there was less feeling sad for missing out, but more emptiness. Starting again became less and less entertaining due to the inevitability that it will all disappear randomly in the future. The feeling persists and the more games it happens in the more hollow all grand adventures in games becomes. Now I rarely play video games, but have spent a lot of time creating experiences with other people using Warhammer 40k tabletop systems. They don't feel hollow, because there is no expectation other than relating with others and sharing a connection. Wish I had discovered 40k when i was a kid.

[@erincondron8105]

NOPE

[@Olorin486]

There’s a similar moment at the end of The Lord of the Rings where Frodo remembers the dream he had in the House of Bombadil. By the time you reach it, hundreds of pages later, it feels like a dream to you too.

[@typhoonzebra]

This Mr Wu guy sounds pretty cool

[@Aloemancer]

Yeah, sounds like he'd be a great DM

[@typhoonzebra]

@@Aloemancer I'd wager he is one since he created interactive stories where the listeners get to create characters

[@InnuendoStudios]

@@typhoonzebra pretty sure he would've thought DnD was satanic, the early 90s were a VERY different time

[@betterlatethannever4536]

I loved the extra content that they released during those dry spells, too. I remember sitting on our bed in the middle of a hot summer day, the windows open but shuttered, the air heavy with the smell of the jasmine flowers that grew around the casement, as I held up my phone in the cool darkness so we could listen to Here and There Along the Echo together. Another dream-like experience to add to the soft, fading moments that float to the top of my mind when I think about this game.

[@peterbillings3276]

I love your perspective on the “imperfect” consumption of a storyline. I’m always worried about what little details I’ll miss if I skip ahead, or allow too much time to pass between episodes/movies. For example, I want to play Witcher 3. I own Witcher 3. But i can’t turn the game on until I’ve beaten Witcher 1 and 2. (Unfortunately, Witcher 1 *starts* with characters I should already know, referring to past events, so I guess I’d have to read the books now too.) I can’t even bring myself to skip ahead during an anime filler arc. But your non-anxious(?) perspective on the experience of not remembering characters and events reminds me that there could actually be something *gained* by simply letting the story come in whatever way it does, because the listener themself is a variable in the story.

[@QuestingRefuge]

I haven't played the game yet so won't experience this but can recall feeling this way with books and other games. In a way, even life can feel this way sometimes. Relearning histories of what really happened or memory getting foggier on specific details in our lives as we get older.

[@ahouyearno]

Just remembering an ex I used to love does that with me. I barely remember the details, I only know I used to like her. I've been married for so long that it's difficult to imagine or remember a life with someone else.

[@Ralyx0]

I mean, you still could. It would only take 7.5 years to finish.

[@ActiveAdvocate1]

To be fair, the Buddha warned us of this 2500 years ago. Creating the illusion of permanence for oneself is a BAD idea, because nothing ever stops changing, and the root of all suffering is clinging, namely clinging to that illusion of permanence in the name of retaining something beautiful that will never leave you. But it won't last. It can't.

[@marekwygnany924]

I'm going back to hoeing my field.

[@DeadpoolX9]

Thats why you search for beauty in impermanence I suppose

[@juanpablovenegas1482]

@@badflamer 🙄

[@freddiekruger3339]

@@badflamer really doesn't sound like you're arguing against buddhism

[@Arrakiz666]

@@freddiekruger3339 To be fair, that's the thing about buddhism, whenever you try to argue against it you find out there's a buddhist who states the very thing you're arguing and considers it what buddhism is actually about.

[@malevolentronweasel659]

Hey I caught this 8 minutes after it went up and I just wanted to say that I really value a appreciate what you do thankyou

[@ez45]

A much better thought out early comment than my "first", I concede.

[@nicuveo]

I feel like a lot of what you say could apply to... Homestuck, of all things. Especially for us reading it as it was published. So many characters, so many digressions... and a story that somehow ended after running for seven years.

[@IrvingIV]

Tagging onto this, If you read Antoine's comment, please also read homestuck.

[@woosh_floosh1969]

Huh, I guess thats why so many fans seemed dissapointed by the ending, while I (someone who read it a year after it was finished) thought it was fine, it wrapped a lot of things up nicely. I guess they weren't dissapointed by the ending (at least partly) but that it ended.

[@expendableindigo9639]

Bojack Horseman?

[@mjhenkel1984]

yessss omg. i came in after Act 4 (which for me was the perfect place to come in) and i can't tell you the thrill i experienced every time i got an UPD8.

[@c3r6s9]

I was just going to comment the same thing! Homestuck was complicated, drawn out, and broken up by long hiatuses. Everyone remembers bits and pieces, and there's entire social media accounts dedicated to reminding people about little things they forgot about the story along the way. Its themes are just as complex, and everyone will have different takeaways from it. Though, I don't think Homestuck felt like it would go on forever while it was running. To me, and the people I experienced it with, it seemed like the end was always just around the corner. That this year would be the year things wrap up in a neat little bow. Which, of course, didn't happen even when the comic ended. The story never got a proper ending, and even the so-called "Epilogues" had no interest in tying up loose ends, and so much interest in creating a whole new mess of ends to start weaving together in the sequel. It's kind of an exhausting piece of media.

[@Dendrago0]

The kind of ephemeral, “You can only do it once” experience you described immediately put me in the mindset of learning Minecraft for the first time I picked it up when I was fifteen, and I still remember dying the first night with no supplies because I didn’t realize you had to hold the mouse down to break blocks I remember my first shelter in a cave in a hole, that I’d later cover with glass and make some pillars covered in torches to mark the entrance I remember the first diamond I found next to a lava pit, and I remember mining my first obsidian with it I don’t remember all the steps in between, but I remember how excited I got at certain milestones, struggling and learning my way in between by trial and error Over the years my love for the game has faded. I’ve learned how to be more efficient with everything I do in it, how to get resources faster and easier, to the point that doing it any other way feels like a hassle But if I could go back and dump everything I’ve learned about the game out of my mind and play it again from square one, I’d love that I’ll never have that experience again, but I adored the time that I had with it

[@Strype13]

I think we all feel this way about any of our favorite games that we end up dumping mindless amounts of time into. "Man, I've practically mastered every aspect of this game... yet, for some reason, it will never be as fun as it was when I had no idea wtf I was doing."

[@MechanicWolf85]

This reminds me of a chat I had with an old friend ho asked me "why do I only play story games once" I had no answer to that, it feels almost like betrayal to play the game's story again and know what will happen and fix the mistakes I made, becouse it will no longer be MY story it is now just a game

[@XXXXXXLisa]

Thank you. I broke up with my boyfriend yesterday, I know it was for the best, but I still hurt and have to grieve. Thank you

[@gracelament]

After being with this game since I was fifteen, this game ending is so surreal. Just putting myself in my shoes back then is both comforting and painful. I was happily ignorant about how my own life would go, as well as the game iself. The beat about Conway losing his leg occuring right around when I myself became disabled is weirdly eerie looking back. Became my favorite game when I played act one, and its still my favorite game to this day.

[@jsrsd]

This was a really wonderful short break from everything recently. I'm cry.

[@Strype13]

Don't be cry!

[@Error898789]

Oh damn, really hitting some Noah Caldwell-Gervais energy in this one, I like it!

[@michimatsch5862]

Yup. Gave me those melancholic vibes like Gervais did when he ended the Red Dead Redemption Video.

[@klip8726]

I can't remember the last time Kentucky was mentioned for any reason besides Mitch McConnell

[@Funnylittleman]

Probably due to the opioid addiction epidemic 😬

[@OpDDay2001]

Derby and bourbon. That's about it. Kentucky is known for its shitbag Congresspersons, alcohol, and horse-racing/gambling. (I'm being facetious and reductive, obviously.)

[@juneguts]

Its roads make me feel like i'm gonna die because they're on 45 degree slopes and they have two creationist museums i'm pretty sure it's a bad place

[@Dorian_sapiens]

@@juneguts My first and only experience with car sickness was on a trip winding through the Appalachians in Kentucky.

[@KillahMate]

Although Kentucky Route Zero has too much class to ever even come close to mentioning Mitch McConnell (or any other familiar name), anyone who plays the game will likely recognize the rot of Mitch McConnell permeating every bone of the game. In a certain sense, the entire game is a poetic examination of the fruits of decades of Mitch McConnell's labor.

[@nicholassamuel9334]

I kind of feel the same way about my first play through of breath of the wild. The first time striking out for the great plateau, and all the discoveries and encounters that spin out when you're not already familiar with the terrain...it was magical, and I'll never be able to experience the game that way again.

[@emorykj3158]

God, videos like this - they’re honestly poetry, pure love letters to something precious and ephemeral found in a video game

[@julietrainey1346]

Kentucky Route Zero is the sort of game I wish were a book, but which I know could never be a book. The small choices, the ways they show the internal struggles of characters in a quiet sort of way, the dragging feel of slow motion through those environments, and the delays in installments don't translate to plain text very well. And that, in itself, fits the strange bittersweetness of a game we want to capture in ways that will never hold it.

[@cezarcatalin1406]

Well, that’s why I beat the crap out of my memory until it learned to store every stupid detail for no reason. ...And now I am low key obsessed with data collection and the fight against entropy.

[@Gammija]

I feel this way about Welcome to Night Vale - its been coming out rather consistently but I haven't always kept up to date, so for 7 years now ive followed these characters and stories through all kinds of things, sometimes with several month gaps inbetween, and Ive never relistened to the majority of it. So whatever they say happened, is what I believe happened, and sometimes its profound, and sometimes just weird, but it always feels familiar. One interesting thing about wtnv is that the time in the story roughly follows time irl, so when they reference something that happened three years ago, I actually listened to it three literal years ago - which is impossible to recreate for new listeners, unless they'd only listen to two episodes a month for 160+ eps

[@professorhazard]

I love how the entire opening description of the game could replace Kentucky Route Zero with Twin Peaks and still be completely accurate.

[@ZgermanGuy.]

its similiar to the feeling of seeing a friend again that you only see every 2-3 months and you get the feel that a lot of things you talk about are repeated

[@name_0]

Placid2 Gaming yeah, i totally agree. when i was younger i had a best friend that i would see everyday. then we both moved to different places but i still went by to their place every sunday after chinese school. but then around 6th grade a chinese school popped up around my neighborhood so i didn't need to go to hers anymore, and then we only saw each other once a month if we were lucky. she used to be my bestest friend in the entire world but now we have nothing to talk about. i don't know what fandoms shes gotten into, whether i would offend her by talking about politics, or what any of her hobbies really are. i havent seen her in ages (mostly because of the coronavirus), but its kind of scary, because ive lost contact with so many close friends who've moved back to their home countries and i feel like thats going to happen here and hhhhhh i don't know what to do since ive known her for so long. if you actually read this, the video and comment section made me really sentimental so sorry about that.

[@cavedarter1213]

I have become so much more cognizant of experiencing something for the first time nowadays. After spending so much of my life listening to albums, reading books, playing video games, and then being sad I couldn't go back and experience them for the first time all over again. So now I try to take the time, when I find something I know I'm going to love but I don't love yet, to cherish those wild exploratory times of discovery.

[@mt.penguinmonster4144]

It feels weird being early to a video by a well-known creator. Perhaps even the same kind of weird as described in this video: an ephemeral experience of the work that can only be experienced in this way once.

[@mjhenkel1984]

just say "first"

[@totallynotjeff7748]

I think that I would get that feeling from the opposite of that experience. Finding a video, years after it came it, one that's part of a loose series that's closely tied to the era and not having the full context of it. When I know the creator has moved on to other things, and all the comments are years old.

[@chesedshalom]

That bit about knowing that nothing will be the same but we can move into something new that might be some kind of okay someday maybe... In this time of pandemic, I felt that really hard

[@chesedshalom]

Also, having just now finished KRZ, I realize that by happenstance my experience was very similar to Ian’s, even tho I came in after all 5 acts had been released. I started playing during early pandemic, and while I didn’t have years of delay between acts, I did each act slowly and kinda forgot about the game in between for awhile.

[@coldDrive]

the liminal space of waiting for krz was probably more crucial to how i see the world than the game itself

[@jacobhoeft4278]

I am always filled with incredible melancholy considering things that can never come back, the final scene as the people fade away and the song fades in made me tear up.

[@riverinthewind4860]

I genuinely cannot put into words how impactful this video is and I thank you for that. I have recently lost a lot of things I can never get back and this really makes me feel as if someone else gets what it's like to deal with the withering that time causes and how beutiful and horrible it can be. Thank you.

[@AHeckman118]

This had me thinking about how special our first times with games often are. If you have a favorite game and you remember specific stories from it, odds are your stories are from the first time you played it. I've played through Dark Souls probably about half a dozen times by now, but nothing will quite match that experience of playing the game for the first time, not even playing another game in the franchise. Each one is its own unique experience that...changes if you try and replay the game again. It doesn't disappear, but it becomes, unquestionably, a *memory.*

[@lzmunch]

Reading homestuck in the later years

[@halfpintrr]

Semi permeable amnesia. I’m 24 and I’m feeling this already. Not significantly, but sometimes I get flashes of a song or a feeling that I felt with my whole being where it existed once but I can’t remember. This malleability scares me. I become astonished when I remember these things, like finding an object that I was devoted to. I feel my memory hardening like cloudy amber. I’m scared of it. But things will forever change. And get better. Maybe.

[@bpdmf2798]

I promise to play it over the course of 10 years with marks in my google calendar to remind me so i can experience it proper like.

[@dan26dlp]

I just now realized why its called co-"vids"

[@knightwing5169]

I'm looking forward to the day that Ian will be able to make another episode of the Alt-Right Playbook.

[@vincentwoodhead6411]

Coincidentally, my Grandma and I would create similar stories driving through Kentucky, all relating to our immediate surroundings, on my summers in the States. It was my favourite part of the trips.

[@TheBornageFobbie]

This reminds me of the rerun of Haruhi Suzumiya, which aired the episodes on the real-life day that episode took place. Same with Katanagatari, each episode takes place roughly a month after the previous and the show aired once a month. Media where the passage of time is more than canon is fascinating.

[@potatooflife8603]

This makes me want to play the game. Thanks! It looks like a literal dream.

[@expendableindigo9639]

Is it my screen or is the overall color of this game really muted and fuzzy, like it’s on low brightness that goes beyond stylistic choice? I kinda remember feeling the same way when I saw this on Steam eons ago.

[@elizabethveldonstuff]

play it, it's beautiful and deeply moving.

[@vreaum]

this experience reminds me of Homestuck... i have very similar feelings: uhhh, this happened? i don't know when? but when it ended.... it was just, over.

[@RazorFringe2]

Imagine a young Ian Danskin sitting in his room, brow furrowed in contemplation, tapping the side of a neatly-cropped head, rolling over the details of Mr.Wu's story and trying to guess where it had been, and where it would go. This video gave me that and more.

[@amberdent651]

You know what this reminds me of? How I watched _Avatar: the Last Airbender_ the first time, as a tiny seven-year-old trying to understand the story by the episodes most often being rerun. I distinctly remember the airing of the four part finale, and watching it with my mom who understood the story way better than I did, at the time. That had been my experience of AtLA for almost a decade, until Netflix released it to stream, and I consumed the story front to back, astonished at how quickly it was paced, and how dense the episodes. Arcs I felt like I spent weeks with were two episodes, likely because I saw the same two episodes on rerun dozens of times over multiple years. Moments that were burned into my brain weren't recurrent at all, they just stuck with me because I that was the few bits of an episode that my elementary schooler brain latched onto. Recurring jokes emerged that I hadn't remembered, and subplots I never remembered watching cropped up throughout. And while I love AtLA, I'll always have an affinity for the first way that I watched it.

[@thebearpuncher]

Would love to see a video about what happened with The Last of Us 2 and what the Alt-Right's role in the controversy was

[@Zet237yt]

Holy cow, I only discovered this video now, but we have had basically the exact same experience with KRZ. It felt as if you had perfectly written my script for me. Thank you for putting this so well into words! 😭

[@seasong707]

Your final summary of the story is just.. [chef's kiss] No game - no story of any kind - has moved me as much as Kentucky Route Zero did. I can relate to your way of playing it, and the magic that comes with it - but I also played the game from start and up until the most recently released Act four times before the final, complete playthrough. I found the game is like a fractal - or as Jacob Geller so beautifully put it, like a cave. The dark, quiet desperation of the characters and the glimpses of pure magic as they try to conserve what they ultimately cannot, and in the process elevate otherwise pointless things into experiences so close to the supernatural it might as well be - it's all so compelling, I need to keep going deeper, but it's all so misty and anecdotal that it feels like there's no bottom, like there's always a deeper layer. That if I go far enough, I will become trapped, just like so many of the characters. And in the final Act, I, the player, just like with the naming of the dog, get to choose for the characters what it all meant to them, weather they stay trapped or move on - if they try to defy the decay of their little universe, or if they simply try to deny it ever meant anything to them. I even get to choose some of their backstories, changing the very reasons they as people found all this to be meaningful in the first place. In this way, the story isn't very personal, and yet, it couldn't be more personal to me. Choosing to construct magic out of the pieces of the dead branches of my world, as it grows and writhes and survives and never stays in one shape for long - that is nothing short of life-affirming. I cannot keep the world from dying, and I cannot pretend it doesn't move me. I have to accept the pain of watching the things I love die, and in the process make the little time I do get to spend with them more meaningful.

[@TheSlipperyNUwUdle]

Your little anecdote at the beginning heavily reminds me of the way the author of Penpal writes those stories. Nostalgic for a memory I never experienced. 🤔

[@jacobbarlow7034]

I do this to myself deliberately with Alastair Reynolds sci fi. I don't really know how it started, but it's become a thing for me that I never reread his books, or check on their chronology (neither the order they were written in, nor the order the events of the books are supposed to take place in) I pick and read one at random every few years. A lot of the experience this gives me is similar to what you describe.

[@TheKatamariguy]

Hell of a planet, Yellowstone...

[@phillapple8260]

As someone with a very poor memory the way you describe playing this game over the years very much reflects my life and how I interact with the people I've met. I am constantly re-meeting people that are vaguely familiar but also made foreign by the fog of a few years time.

[@joelsmith3473]

I jumped into both the TV show LOST and the book series Wheel of Time fairly early, well before any ending was on the horizon. Something they both had was this feeling of analyzing every detail for clues to what the far off installments would, presumably, tell everyone plainly. I was fortunate to have friends for both of these that I could dive deep into these details as well as online communities filled with more vigilant fans with better aptitude to find, often misguided, patterns. Then they both ended. And they both ended in a rather disappointing manner, one more than the other. The multitude of details didn't really matter all that much in the end, but damn were they a thrill during the ride. Now that they are over, there isn't really a point to scrutinize and theorize to even close to the extent that we did in real time; you might just keep a mental tally of mysteries that you keep in the back of your mind as you watch or read to the end, content with the fact that anything important will be revealed shortly. The experience is fundamentally different.

[@RedShocktrooperRST]

That "first time experience" is one that gets to me. The subsequent times are never the same. The first time I tried this certain type of root beer, it knocked my socks off. A strong, sweet taste of vanilla, a slight peppery tingle on the tongue, and the bottle took me an hour to drink - and this was a small single-serving bottle. The next bottle normalized to that regular root beer taste which I do quite like, but that which wasn't the same. By the time I finished the six pack about two weeks later, I had a tough time really telling if it was just gussied up Big K-brand root beer.

[@ElthenAziraph]

How funny, your experience of Kentucky Route Zero Mirrors something I've always felt reading Steven Eriskon's ten very big books of the Malazan Book of the Fallen (incidentally my favourite series) - and evokes a similar journey of folk tale, of myriad of seemingly familiar but unplaceable characters, of muddy memories of digressions on this huge and sprawling journey through a world in chaos, of fantastical and meandering plot, of even rediscovering stories in rereads and being really surprised in the huge gaps between memory and text... Guess I gotta play that game then.

[@SnowCatKroe]

I've not played this game but your analysis of everything is always so beautiful. I'm definitely gonna give this game a shot.

[@KittyKatQA]

One of my favorite books, Paper Towns, is a book I haven't read in years, and have a very hazy memory of, but I recall the same sentiment that you've shared, of not remembering the proper beginning or end of the book, and only remembering the middle parts, the good parts, as it were. The road trip section, as I recall it, was only a sliver of the whole book and yet, it's the part I remember the most vividly. Not the buildup, not Margo or Q's adventure, just a seemingly normal interaction between friends in very not normal circumstances.

[@nekosd43]

I had the same experience, though I was onboard since day one with this game. I remember spending the long stretches between chapters thinking "did that happen? what was that game?" and it always felt like I came back to something different because I half remembered the characters but held onto the beats of the mood. It was good. And then I replayed it in full once I was done, with the now included interlude chapters (which didn't use to work on my computer so I never played them when they were originally released) and it was... a totally different game again! Still good! Still loved it! But now I was not drifting through it like a dream, I was recalling what actually happened, like when you sit down with friends and reminisce about an event and they correct you about the details you forgot. And I think it's kinda appropriate that I will never really get that first dreamlike playthrough again, because you can't really relive a dream in the same way.

[@caligulacorday]

that feeling of half-remembering something meaningful to you is, i think, perfectly crystallized in the songs by the bedquilt ramblers. something about feeling like these songs are familiar and that you ought to be able to remember the lyrics and have memories assigned to the music, while still having those words and memories escape you, is really powerful.

[@stainedhelmet8702]

The way you describe your relationship with this game is the foundation of my love of comic books. There are 10s of 1000s of comics that are all canon to DC and MARVEL which have been written for 80 years and I've been reading since I was a kid so I can't remember what order things happened or if I have read a comic containing a referenced event or if the writer just made up an element to a character's past. I also cannot fathom the day when Bruce Wayne beats crime and hangs up the cowl or when the punisher has finished his quest, these stories exist in a now with a past that happened but is hazy and a future that is never to come and it is stable in the status quo always remaining but every story tries to break that status quo.

[@Canama139]

I had an experience that was both like this and opposite to it as a teenager and young adult with Homestuck. The funny thing is, I don't actually *like* Homestuck, at least not as a finished product. Actually I think it kind of sucks; I would recommend against reading it. It was a strong start that completely and utterly collapsed under its own weight and lost site of any writerly goal; by the end I was only reading out of some kind of obligation. But that first two-odd years, oh man. There were updates almost daily (hence the "opposite" part; no 4-year wait here), and the readerbase was always speculating on what would come next. Then it would come, and we would find out how right or wrong we were, and then the process would repeat. The release schedule, and the way people responded to it, became inextricable from the art. I don't think it's a coincidence that the quality of the work went down drastically as the releases slowed. I actually went back and reread it a couple years back; for what it's worth I think the first parts still hold up, even experienced all at once and in bulk, and the later parts still are just as bad as they were with a painstaking release schedule. Apparently there's an ongoing sequel; I wouldn't know what it's like, because I'm through. I stuck it out to the end of the comic. There is no more. Funnily enough, Undertale, by Homestuck alumnus Toby Fox, actually is the only thing I can think of that repeated this for me. There's another difference, compared both to Homestuck and KRZ, which is that it released all at once and that was it. But in those first couple weeks there was an atmosphere of rampant speculation as people were trying to figure out what the game was, exactly, and what it was trying to say (and even how it was trying to say it). I was lucky enough to be there when it happened. Now the game has been thoroughly datamined, and a million and one words have been written about its themes. And it's not interesting anymore.

[@PureSlime]

I haven't played this game. Until now, I hadn't even heard of it. But this was completely fascinating, and your ability to elucidate on such a specific series of emotions is remarkable.

[@isabelracine1066]

I know next to nothing about video game culture, so I really appreciate the way you condense information so as to make it more accessible to people like me.

[@lucase.2546]

Thank you so much for talking about this game. [Hopped on bandwagon right before Act IV, so I sat through the long wait before V.] I wondered when someone would run another video essay on KR0. I don't know if it's because I'm speedrunning adolescence, or the increasing pace of global communications, but I feel more and more every day like KRZ and our real world are *merging*. Just a bunch of digressions that come and go and that we forget in hindsight - one new bit of world news after the next, and one teenager drama tale after another. I don't feel the need to play within the listless world of KRZero as much anymore because everything feels like that these days. I'm just passin' through.

[@adammaher403]

I just finished playing this game the other day, and by the time I was done, I wasn't really sure what to make of it. It was so meandering and contained so much that felt related, but not the same, that it was difficult to even decipher what had happened, let alone what any of it meant to me. I started playing I think in April of this year. 5 months ago. Despite the game only taking me about 15 total hours to complete, I was inside of it for a lot longer than that. It hadn't been my intention, but I ended up taking gaps in between acts that lasted weeks or even months at times. Maybe this story just feels as though it's meant to be told over long stretches of time, and implants that idea in each person's head the moment they begin playing. All I know is as soon as I finished Act 1, I needed a break to do something a bit lighter in tone, and then I didn't find a good time to play for a little while, and by Act 2, that became the modus operandi of my time playing the game. Even though my playtime only lasted months compared to the years it lasted for others who started playing it as it came out, rather than once they noticed people talking about their thoughts on the whole, it still feels as though it took place across long fading memories or dreams the way you've described. I had a hard time even describing it to friends as I was playing it. They would say, "what's it about?" and I would say, after a long pause, "...I don't really know." I remembered and could describe moments, or the way something made me feel, or *that* something was confusing to me, but not how. I could understand the shape and color of the game, but not whatever filled it in. All this to say, maybe it's the style of the game or the way the story is told, but I think no matter when or how you play the game, it seemingly quickly gets lost in its own history, and in yours. I think it's an intentional part of the experience to feel as if you only half remembered a dream, one whose details fade away as soon as you wake up, but whose impact can be felt long after it slips through the creases in your mind. And I guess a game that can make me feel like that, that can make me rant about it for 4 paragraphs is pretty damn good.

[@Oblivion776]

The quality of your videos has always been good but this was the first one in a while that made me cry.

[@_ack_]

The integrity of this analysis HINGED on picking the only correct name for Blue

[@MegaVidFan1]

THIRD FLOOR BEARS!!!! I was absolutely ecstatic when I saw that for the first time. I'm so glad you liked it too!

[@Rissa_1322]

I'm playing this game right now after it's been completed and it still feels that way. I think it's because of how slow you move. Early on Weaver asks you to find Shanon and come back to fix her TV, and even if you say no, it still happens, so I immediately assume your choices are irrelevant and just figured that whatever was happening was just going to happen. This is the first I'm hearing of selling your soul (except for the first time I watched this video and then forgot).

[@peterkirk8510]

This is how I've found that some long movie series feel. Something like Harry Potter. I was born in 95, so I was a child when the first movie came out, and in my mid teens when it concluded. The journey you go from the beginning to the end just... doesn't feel the same. It's sorta like the Marvel movies. I imagine most people that went to see Iron Man saw it as: 1. Cool action movie 2. Remembering comic books from their childhood Now, I know it's pretty arguable how "good" the avengers series is, but seeing the first Iron Man as a member of group 1 was crazy. It was the start of a journey, yknow? You go from "well that was cool" to more and more and more, everything being fleshed out and interconnected. Being at the end of an entire arc, looking back, remembering how I felt in 2007 after watching the first movie is insane. It's like looking down from the top of a mountain at the exact spot you started climbing. You can imagine yourself down there, and think, "wow, if only he knew what was coming".

[@ruki4929]

...Well, I wanted to play this game at some point, and I keep forgetting to do so. My brain likes to do that to most games, actually - leaving long spans of time between having in a game, so whenever I do get back to it, I never fully remember what was going on, or who people are. And whenever I look back to them now, they're usually hazy tales that never really had a start or end to them. Usually I end up restarting games when it gets like that - but maybe I won't. Especially for this one, whenever I get around to playing it. Just carry on with games that i only half remember. Nothing lasts forever, and nothing really ends.

[@expendableindigo9639]

Come for a video game, stay for Mr. Wu.

[@AliceDiableaux]

Great video to release during the Steam Summer Sale. I'm extremely averse to video games in which *any* part of interacting with the world is through violence, and although I definitely love puzzle games with a great story like the Talos Principle or Portal 2, I find myself mostly drawn to non-violent exploration, surrealist experimental games and games that are simply a poetic and beautiful experience (I fucking loved Gris), so that reduces the potential games to play for me by... a lot. But this sounds right up my alley, and when I went to look it up, to my surprise Outer Wilds, which I wanted to play because of the excellent Jacob Geller, had been added to the Steam Store on 2 weeks ago! So thanks for the recommendation.

[@xaqbazit]

I felt this way watching twin peaks for the first time before bed, then dreaming about it and watching the next episode vaguely aware of my dreams and the previous episodes. Not really sure what was supposed to matter and where it was going but mostly enjoying the feeling

[@moeezS]

That's why I don't want to finish Episode 5. I don't want this to end. Or maybe when I do finish it, I'll play it all again. It's been a very melancholic and relevant post-recession videogame experience. For how vague and cryptic KRZ has been, maybe that'll make it easier to replay and discover new things.

[@emadwolf10]

I started playing and was part of the journey when act 2 was released and that's pretty much how I explained it to my friends.

[@1Hawkears1]

I started this game awhile ago, then, wanting to watch this, went back yo finish the game. I couldnt decide whether I should start over or not (i hadn't realized it wasnt released as a full game) I ended up resuming my old playthrough and im so glad i did because i experieneced a lot of this . "I vaugley remeber flying on a giant bird??? Or was that a dream?"

[@MXCinenautas]

“Digression as epiphany” if you like that sort of thing maybe you should read “The life and opinions of Tristram Shandy, gentleman” It's not easy to get started at first, because of the language and cultural distance, but you can do it with an annotated edition and some patience and it really pays off, it’s like Pale Fire or House of leaves or Ulysses but in the XVIII century

[@shayokami7410]

I've been writing stories for seven years now, and nearly all of them are unfinished. If I die today, I hope that at least some of them will never end.

[@midnightcowboi8193]

I've always been morbidly curious what it was like to play this game from the very beginning. I've put a lot of time into knowing this game, in part because I made a video essay on it, but also because every part of it was released when I started. I've had the ability to reflect on the work as a whole, including the multi-media elements, within a condensed amount of time. While I think the game still isn't "complete", in the sense that every element of it is accessible, I keep wondering what it must've been like to play this game in segments over the course of a decade. This is the first video I've seen that really tries to capture that.

[@user-qw3lt2rg9l]

"Unless someone decides to play each act 6 months between each other" I might end up repeating this cycle cause' of my adhd and depression. Thenwhen I finish act 6 of Kentucky route zero, I might just remember this video in the same ephemeral, dream like way, and I'll think about who accidentally planted the seed that brought me there.

[@im19ice3]

that made me sad and i have zero reference for what this piece of media is... maybe because my dad did a lot of that sort of storytelling in my childhood, neither of us remembers clearly enough to grasp what was

[@JosiahHilden]

ngl these covid ads have a solar vibe to me as john greens “anthropocene reviewed” and i dig it

[@johnfarley7074]

What a melancholic video. Reminds me of that sad style of bluegrass music that gives you goosebumps when you listen alone.

[@mrstraiban]

First I played the four KRZ chapters one by one with a long time between them. When the last episode dropped I played all the five episodes one after another. My first experience with the first four episodes seemed somehow bigger, more dreamlike and more mystical. Once I re-played and combined the five episodes, the whole experience somehow collapsed although still remaining enjoyable.

[@Jeakkers]

There is This One KZbin Show Called BFDI That Has Been Running for 11--ish Years. I Have Been Around For About 5, and I Think Often About When Episodes Released, Where I Was, How I Felt, How Those Around Me Who Also Liked it Responded With Me. So Many Memories are Linked With This Show, and this Video Kinda Put into Words How I Felt When the Most Recent Season Ended. Beautiful Video.

[@ironcladshade1]

I feel like there's a value to making it an anniversary event, or maybe taking the time to show it to someone else, but one episode a year

[@gbw767]

This may just be my take but never has a video game review been composed so beautifully

[@maxian2132]

every last video you and jacob geller make hits me like a truck

[@julianoguerra7600]

I felt completely astounished when i saw the release of act 5 and immediately downloaded to play it. Then I saw it had sub acts and It was really weird because I didn't remembered they existing. I played them and some felt like I did play before, but some didn't. Without looking it up I couldn't tell what was new and what was old.

[@amyallen6863]

Also like... I was a full episode in before realizing Junebug and Johnny were robots?? Like that... could have been changed between episodes and I totally just went along with it!

[@duskmantle2562]

Oddly enough, I feel like my experience with KRZ was really similar, despite the fact that I played through it in quick succession after all 5 acts were released, and that I also watched a friend play through all 5 acts in the same way. That sense of not remembering whether certain things have already been explained or not and doubting your own perception of reality just feels very inherent to the game, for me at least, because there are so many unhinged elements that the game will place in front of you with no explanation while acting like they're entirely normal. The mine is full of shadowy figures of the miners that once worked there. Are they ghosts? Manifestations of the past? Pure hallucinations of the main characters? The game's not going to tell you. The moment you add Junebug to your party and start walking around with her, you /could/ notice that an odd mechanical whirring sound coincides with her walking. I heard it for multiple acts at the same time as the purring of the truck's engine, and assumed that it was just the truck being old and beat up. You could theoretically notice from the moment she joins you that Junebug's an android, but the game's not going to tell you. I'm pretty sure I didn't even notice that that sound was from her until I watched my friend play through the game. The game, to me, naturally induces this sense of constant amnesia, because it presents every single thing it puts in front of you as if it's always been there and requires no explanation. Every element is something that's showed up in a different story, but the game's not going to tell you about that story if you haven't heard it. Even without time gaps inserted, the game's still Mr. Wu.

[@lzmunch]

This is kind of how I feel about most media, you can only read, watch, or play something for the first time once, and I prefer to cherish that.

[@crossroadswanderer]

I only recently found out about and played this game. Honestly, this might partly be because I binged the first 4 acts and interludes in an 11 hour session the first day I picked it up, and partly because it was so weird that I eventually just sort of sat with the weird and stopped trying to make sense total sense of it, but the experience of half-remembered characters that you're not actually sure you met before was part of my experience of the game, too. **Spoilers beyond here** Like, in act IV, suddenly there was Clara and...I can't remember the name of the other person who just sort of showed up, seemingly without introduction, on the boat. And the interludes between acts introduced several characters, but sometimes it took a little while for me to recognize them within the acts. Like, I didn't remember the group of tabletop roleplayers from act I until they mentioned the die that was in Conway's jacket in act V. But I think they actually showed up before, maybe in the interlude between acts IV and V, and I didn't recognize them. It makes the experience of the game kind of non-linear, because you're drawn back and forth in the story as you piece together who the characters are and where you met them. I think a lot of it comes from the fact that we tend to recognize people within certain contexts and not others, so when, for instance, Jacob shows up later in the story, in a very different context from where he was in act I, he seems to be a different person until something sparks that recognition. I think the only character who was recognizable in all contexts for me was Weaver, and it was because she was so closely tied to one of the protagonists. Thank you for putting the theme of the game in simple terms: that it's about what the world takes from you. I definitely got a sense of that, but I couldn't quite figure out how to put it into words. I didn't actually consider age and injury or really anything other than capitalism as the things doing the taking away, but it makes sense. My interpretation of Conway's leg was about the Faustian pact that healthcare is in America when you're poor. It wasn't "his leg" because it was debt made manifest. And it made even more sense when the indebted skeletons showed up. They weren't explicitly there because of medical debt, but all of them had some kind of insurmountable debt that made their bodies not their own anymore because their labor belonged to their debtors. Conway's arm changing later could be an indication that he's rapidly falling deeper in debt. But I think your interpretation is similarly useful. Many of the skeletons and soon-to-be skeletons are there because of a combination of addiction and poverty taking their lives from them, including Conway. I literally only finished the game a few days ago, so I'm still kind of ruminating over some of the themes of it, but it was a unique experience. Beyond the experiences I talked about above, it also managed to be incredibly dark in a kind of numb way. The events of the story and the things that happen to the characters just are what they are. Those emotions seem to only find release in the music peppered throughout the game.

[@anakaleflax]

This is probably my favorite non-political video on this channel. Okay, the Melee or Phil Fish essay is a close second/third.

[@lanagievski1540]

I just finished the game and wow. This is exactly how I felt about it.

[@Kobolds_in_a_trenchcoat]

"I don't presume that what I'm describing is the right experience only that it was mine and it was remarkable." I'm young and I'm not in particularly bad health right now, I don't plan on dying soon but I wouldn't mind this being my epitaph or at least said at my funeral. On a less, macabre note, I have a page of quotes in my google document that I find particularly poignant, that's going straight in there. I do include the context the quote was in, but I deliberately do not care much about the original context of the quotes (I have a weird fascination with applying a quote completely outside the intended context).

[@Sk3tchful]

What primordial entity did you sign a contract with for your rough unpolished works to still be so put together and thoughtful? Asking for a friend. Great stuff.

[@MadDgtl]

noticed you didn't mention them but oh man, please tell me you played the interludes too, here and there along the echo was probably one of the things that stuck with me the most about my playthrough. it sticks out not only as the first non-musical thing to be fully voice acted but it's easily the most comedic part of the game too while not breaking from the overall tone of the story/world

[@flameraven42]

I have heard such amazing things about this game; I will really have to sit down and play it. I actually did not know that it completed only recently. :O But I basically always play games like 2 years late anyway.