I’ve owned Kentucky Route Zero since 2015 and refused to play even a moment before it was completed. This is a game that’s gone years between chapters releasing because it’s apparently made by whimsical beings who experience time differently than everyone else, and as such, I figured it’d be safest to avoid getting sucked in before the supposedly brilliant story was completed (which was a big “maybe” for a long time).

Now that Kentucky Route Zero has finally received its final fifth chapter, however, I’ve been playing a little of it, and it’s weird. Is it as good as the hype around it suggests? Well, no. Thus far, it’s been an undeniably artsy experience more about how things feel than what they are (not quite to the same degree as Lucah: Born of a Dream but in the ballpark), and I can appreciate that to some degree, but it’s also so distractingly prone to getting lost in thought that it starts to feel incoherent. It’s so devoted to being dreamlike that it fails to build a foundation to contrast its weirdness.

This is compounded by external forces; Kentucky Route Zero has long been a favorite of writers looking to sound erudite and “with it” by gushing over what’s effectively a super artsy adventure game that lands between a point-and-click and Telltale-style interactive movie. Is it fair to hold their overblown praise against the game? Probably not if this were a normal case, but Kentucky Route Zero is allergic to normal, and the delays—which are on no one’s shoulders but the developers—have allowed expectations to build up to unreasonable levels. This is less of a game at this point than a blank slate for existing player feelings to be projected upon. If you played this years ago and thought it would be brilliant, you won’t be disappointed. If you’re just coming in and have played more coherent artsy-wordy games like Disco Elysium, it won’t compare favorably.

I’m choosing to keep an open mind about the story despite being thoroughly unimpressed at the moment. Right now, my main complaint centers around the gameplay, which is unbearably slow. I have no doubt that Kentucky Route Zero is this slow on purpose because it’s a more deliberate way of interacting with the game (or other such nonsense), but at a certain point, you’re just wasting the player’s time by forcing them to watch a bunch of characters shamble ponderously across the screen. Dear developers: your thought-provoking art game needs a goddamn run button.

Another thing that’s becoming obvious is that the interactive screen prompts sometimes take agonizingly long to appear. You can see that in the museum at the beginning of the embedded video. Sometimes, the buttons just don’t show up, leaving you shuffling around, trying to coax Kentucky Route Zero into allowing you to interact. It’s not always this bad, but the whole production’s slow enough (even as a fast reader) without an additional need to wait around. Now, I’m open to this being a one-time occurrence, just as I’m remaining open to the possibility that all of the weird story threads end up coming together brilliantly. Right now I’m in the second act, though, and I’m not impressed. Kentucky Route Zero too often feels like a monument to awkward weirdness that exists solely for its own sake, oscillating between the unexplained, barely functional, and uninvited as though they all carry an inherent spark of brilliance that radiates through every one of the game’s pores. Instead, it’s offputting.

Impressions: Kentucky Route Zero first appeared on Killa Penguin