Kentucky Route Zero: An Ode to David Lynch
The Lynchian Sublime in the realm of video games

You ride in the dead of night. The fog of the future obscures your vision. The longer you’re road-bound, the harder it gets to see, to figure out what’s ahead. The road is a mystery. And in the darkness, your deepest subconscious rises to the surface. You confuse dreams with reality. There’s nothing in the headlights but your reflection. The world’s outermost elements are manipulating you. Your hippocampus acts up, neurons misfire, and your brain betrays your sanity. Yet despite all this assault, you feel something warm tending the temperature of your skin. In the long road after the sun has set, fire walks with you; a fire that one particular artist knows too well – the burning flame of nightmares and the sweet spark of illuminating dreams – a fire that visionary director David Lynch stoked long ago, that glow bright even still.
Lynchian Legacy
David Lynch’s recent passing made me reminisce about his legacy, not only in the medium of filmmaking but also in the gaming industry. He has left behind a library of inspiration for present and future creators, and his trademark “Lynchian” adjective will be stuck in the lexicon of artistic conversation for decades to come. From his subversion of procedural television in Twin Peaks to his descent into psychosexual dreams in Blue Velvet, Lynch’s body of work never shies away from showing the macabre nature of human unwaking experience. On the contrary, he often balances the mundane appearance of suburban Americana and interrupts it with a seedy dark underbelly.
To celebrate him, I would like to explore his influences on Kentucky Route Zero, the episodic game of 5 acts and 7 years.
What does it mean to be "Lynchian?"
But before I begin, what is “Lynchian?” What is it that makes Lynch’s work so identifiable and influential? Starting as a painter, David Lynch’s sensibilities border on the surreal, caring less about portraying how things are as they seem, and more about how things actually are underneath. This style can be found in his movies as well. In a Lynchian film, the things happening on screen don’t demarcate between dreams and reality; there is no clear delineation. He treats them both with equal weight and screen presence. His irrational juxtaposition of not only images but also a chain of events, conveys dream logic, stripping the curtains of social performance from any pretension. Lynch puts to the surface the darkness of the human condition, but he never forgets to show that there’s light too.

Each Route is its Own Destination
Back to Kentucky Route Zero, the game is designed by Jake Elliott and Tamas Kemenczy, who both have experience in experimental art. It shows because that approach permeates every aspect of the game design, bearing more resemblance to an interactive art piece rather than a goal-driven video game. The game follows an ever-increasing cast of characters on a road trip to deliver antiques, taking place in one elongated night and ending in the morning. But to reach their destination, they must travel through the eponymous Route Zero, and along their journey, encounter a history that haunts their every step. Each act or episode is linked by intermissions as if the game is a play. These interludes explore different art pieces that some characters of the game are a part of, such as a fully fledged art exhibition and a hybrid stage play.
Across the whole game’s length, there is a pervading feeling of melancholy. The characters carry antiques and meet elderly people who have nothing left but stories and stored dreams. The art installations we experience are from the same people who can’t let go of their past, and in an effort to sate their obsession, turn it into art. This desperation is especially felt when we encounter Hard Times Whiskey, an underground distillery with a skeleton crew of glowing skeletal employees. They are the victims of debt and alcoholism brought to physical form, taking shape as skeletons suffering wage slavery, paying off debts that only end in death.
It is a dark visual that puts regular anxieties to their artistic extremes, not out of place in David Lynch’s works, and its symbolic representation of modern reality is a gut punch, to say the least.
Breaking into Song
To balance the bleakness, let me take you through a moment in Act 3 that stood out to me as something special, not only from this game but from video games in general.
Imagine you and the people you meet on the road randomly meet a pair of musicians, and in exchange for a favor, you watch their show at a bar. There, you sit on a folding chair and see the singer prepare on a small stage. Then, something happens that you don’t expect. The lights dim and the roof parts, revealing the night sky and its army of stars. The woman, who you didn’t know was an android, glows luminescent in a dress that wasn’t there before.
This is what happens in Kentucky Route Zero. It mirrors similar scenes from David Lynch’s oeuvre, such as Isabella Rossellini singing in Blue Velvet or Julee Cruise in Twin Peaks. For Lynch, music can speak to the heart in a powerful wordless way.

What adds to the moment is that before this point, there was no voice-over in the game, as every dialogue is text-based. Like the stories our brains tell us when we’re asleep, the voices of every cast of characters are our own. Moreover, there is no conventional decision-making in Route Zero, every path leads to the same destination. But, there are dialogue choices that players can pick, which creates different dynamic conversations, that do not alter the story, but may influence the mood of it.
And when you hear the ethereal song titled “Too Late To Love You,” with the audience in rapt attention, you get to choose the verse, shaping the song to mean whatever you want it to mean. This makes the moment all the more personal as if you’re lucid dreaming, and in the expanse of your half-awake mind, you don’t feel alone anymore; someone else is dreaming the same dream right there with you. It’s not only darkness behind your eyelids, there are stars too, and it’s warm. Even though there are debts to be paid, and the past haunts you, when you huddle together to listen to a good song, that weight is lifted. Like any good dream, as the roof comes back to separate the sky, you wake up rejuvenated.
The song is sung by a digitally altered Ben Babbitt, who also makes the game’s soundtrack that you can hear online, including an entire diegetic album sung as the game’s character, further fleshing out the dream space and blurring its bounds. In its best moments, Route Zero accentuates the feeling that anything could happen in the shield of night; you can meet anyone, your life can change, and you may even discover yourself a little more. And after you finish the game, waking up from its mesmerizing grip, you may not understand the full extent of what happened, or what comes after, but you would have felt something then, and according to David Lynch, that’s all that matters.

Interpretation of Dreams
They say art is meant to disturb the comfortable. But when the events of real life are more disturbing than fiction, it is time for surrealist art to comfort us, soothe us into a sleep of dreams, and bring us together. When wages are not equal to the disturbingly high cost of living, maybe you’ll remember a play that speaks your fears aloud. When evil sits in a house of worship and preaches power, you’ll remember a song from long ago whose lyrics reveal a relevant truth.
We live in a time where people no longer hide neither shame nor decadence. Evil isn’t so subtle anymore. Evil proudly proclaims itself on the stage. They don’t bother to camouflage with lies or false pretenses. In this absurd world, David Lynch’s work is more relevant than ever. The mask has come off, structural order has broken down, and malevolent forces run amok. But in both art and dreams, we may find sanctuary, where we don’t necessarily make sense of why bad things happen, but we understand them emotionally. We can intuit when something is wrong and when the world shouldn’t be the way it is now. And what should we do about it? Maybe we’ll get our answer in dreams, or a game, or better yet, a game that feels like a dream. There, in the halfway place where we’re not quite awake enough to question things or analyze their meaning, we find a sublime supply of answers, and with them, a hope that more people will realize there is a darkness behind the safe appearance of their lives.
The simplicity of Route Zero’s art style, with its faceless and voiceless characters, makes its message more ambiguous. And like any dream, what you make of it is your own. To decipher it is to strip it of its power, and to overexplain art is to take it away from its artists. But to feel it and feel it fully is to experience it as they intended. Like other Lynchian narratives, you can take the story at face value, a magical realist adventure, where there really is a giant Eagle and robot singers. Or, you can let the story take you wherever it wants to go, keeping what it represents to heart. In dreams, there are no real endings, it’s just the road, and the route taken. And after you wake up, certain images stick like cement.

Waking Up
How many art exhibitions exist in the world or games that no one ever plays? How many movies are no longer in circulation? Kentucky Route Zero explores characters who discover these dilapidated museums and dusty computers, knowing that they were someone’s dream, once, someone’s only way of making sense of the world. As such, all art lost and found should be celebrated. David Lynch advocates for us to not bother with puzzling out what something means, and to not be too focused on watching "ending explained" videos. We should only care to feel their emotional resonance. And as long as we get it through feeling, we don’t have to overthink the details that got us there.
“The more abstract a thing gets, the more varied the interpretations.” Lynch was frustrated by people’s obsession with analyzing his movies, digging at him to figure out some true intent. To him, art should speak for itself, and we can come to our own distinct conclusions. That is part of the fun. So to really celebrate David Lynch’s legacy, I’m afraid my words aren’t enough to give him justice. We must honor his wishes by experiencing the arts as they are, not vicariously through words. So go play Kentucky Route Zero, watch Twin Peaks, and there, in the depths of dream-filled places, you will find the sublime flame that David Lynch fanned.