Alguns recortes do texto de Madison Butler, para o Sidequest:
But while getting to 5 Dogwood Drive is the goal of the game, it isn’t the point of it. […] Financial instability keeps the characters forever caught in the liminal space that stretches between one stage of life and the next. The uncertainty makes each choice feel weighty yet meaningless at the same time. Ultimately their fates are shaped—some more bluntly than others—by capitalism’s hand, which lends the narrative a unique anxiety.
The liminal state, as defined by anthropologist Victor Turner, is the period of in-betweenness and transition from one stage to another; liminal personae do not abide by the rules and groups that determine social order elsewhere.
Kentucky Route Zero takes on liminality as defined by two different anthropologists. The first definition is by Victor Turner, who defined liminality as the period of time a person spends between two states or stages of life. The second is what anthropologist Paul Rabinow called purgatorial anxiety, a type of liminality characterized by a feeling that the future is on the line. One important aspect of Turner’s definition of liminality is that personal or social transformation awaits liminal personae on the other side; for better or worse, their lives will somehow change from one stage to the next.
Dr. Susan Merrill Squier argues the heightened stake in the future is the key difference between Turner’s liminality and Rabinow’s purgatorial anxiety. In Liminal Lives: Imagining The Human At The Frontiers Of Biomedicine, she writes, “The liminal is an arena of possibility, the purgatorial is an arena of responsibility.” Turner’s liminality is one of potential; in Kentucky Route Zero, the night takes characters to the most unexpected places. Rabinow’s liminality is one of reckoning; the morning comes and the characters have to make decisions that will determine their futures.
[…] The game asks a lot of both its characters and its audience; it asked me to consider questions big and small, many explicit and some implied. But mostly it asked me to observe, without affecting in any meaningful way, its narrative and outcome. I could change the tone of the scene by choosing a slightly more positive or negative response, but Conway was always going to end up at Hard Times Distillery and Shannon’s livelihood was always going to hang in the balance. The audience, like the skeletons who work for the distillery and the ghosts who roam the town and the characters who live in it, is trapped in a state of purgatorial anxiety. We can only guess what happens to Shannon, Ezra, and the others once the curtains have closed and the game has ended.
If music is a ritual of goodbyes, it is also a ritual of beginning. Kentucky Route Zero leaves so much open to interpretation, but in asking me to imagine a future, it gave me the space to imagine a better one, one where the pain and hardship are worth it—a future worth fighting for.
