The update also lets you “zoom in on details in the scene,” which sounds handy for smaller screens.

“We've also overhauled and improved the ‘Classic’ interface from the original release, and its lo-fi companion, ‘Retro,’” the studio also wrote. Kentucky Route Zero’s smaller acts and text-based nature make it almost perfect for on-the-go devices, although I’m more interested in using the game as bedtime reading instead, as someone who regrettably bounced off of it in the early acts. “The new ‘Modern’ interface is designed to be more flexible and readable on a wider variety of devices, including tablets and the Steam Deck,” the studio wrote in a recent Steam blog. The aptly named Postmodern Update overhauls the game’s user interface with a new Modern mode, alongside a host of bug fixes and more language options. It was a teasing release schedule that only aided the game’s surreal mystery, so it’s no surprise that the studio have dropped the game’s first major update three years after the fifth and final chapter wrapped things up. “And we grew, and filled in, and… we did all that together.” Unorthodox and plaintive, Kentucky Route Zero rewards repeat play, and will sustain repeat consideration.Developer Cardboard Computer sporadically released their poetic adventure game, Kentucky Route Zero, in acts spread across multiple years. “When we met we were nothing, just these little grey shadows,” says one character. But within the final wreckage there are a few redemptive jewels to be found – moments of valuable togetherness, of community and, therein, of love. This is the backdrop against which the story unfolds. Corporate greed, the erosion of worker’s rights, and the ways in which privatised healthcare disproportionately penalises those least able to afford it act as thematic scenery. This is a powerful treatise on the slow-motion plummet toward hardship experienced by those either unwilling or unable to adapt to the tectonic shifts of capitalism. Kentucky Route Zero’s story is softly and opaquely told, often leaving the player to discern fine pattern and meaning, but unquestionably the game examines the lives and prospects of American workers forced to watch forlornly as their jobs are made obsolete in a changing world. In this way you become something of an omniscient onlooker, able to read the thoughts of individual conversationalists while choosing which of those thoughts is expressed out loud in order to direct the flow of discussion. You can choose which member of your slowly expanding party responds – and how, by selecting from a few dialogue options. The mechanics of conversation are unusual, too. 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. 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. 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. To state the game’s goal in such straightforward terms is to do the expedition on which the game takes its players a disservice.

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. 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.

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. 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.

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