"Your choices matter" is a refrain repeated again and again in the marketing campaigns of dozens upon dozens of narrative-driven games. Like most things with video games, it's the promise of scale and scope. The more variances that can occur, the more drastic the consequences, the more the game is seen as a success. The recently released Detroit: Become Human promoted itself on this basis, touting huge choices and variations. True enough, the game can play out with drastic differences. The problem is that no matter what way it played out, I felt nothing.

I'll wager that the most meaningful decisions you've had in these kind of games, the ones that really moved you, were the smaller choices. Not whether you saved the entire galaxy in Mass Effect but whether you rescued your good buddy Garrus from giving in to vengeful bloodlust. Not who rules the world's kingdoms by the end of The Witcher 3 but whether you took the time to bond with your adopted daughter Ciri, to help her grow as a person.

With that in mind I think Kentucky Route Zero is the game that really points the way forward on "meaningful" choices. It follows a delivery truck driver named Conway as he's pulled into an increasingly surreal world beneath Kentucky. See, it takes a completely different approach to choice. It doesn't have big branching narratives. Instead the choices you make are largely contained within a scene. Some carry on throughout the game's episodes (only four of five have been released) but don't change the direction of the plot. Take, for instance, the first choice it gives the player. What's the name of Conway's faithful canine companion? No matter what name you choose it doesn't change anything that follows. But does it change how you feel about that dog? Damn right.

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Developer Cardboard Computer has released a new Kentucky Route Zero "interlude" mini-episode ahead of the game's long-awaited fifth - and final - instalment.

Kentucky Route Zero is a magical realist road trip adventure focussing on the titular secret highway and its strange surrounding areas. Five episodes (or "Acts", as Cardboard Computer would have it) are planned in total, and the game's final episode is scheduled to release soon, seven years after development began.

Interlude episodes have become a bit of a tradition now for Kentucky Route Zero, and are low-key, often highly experimental, narrative experiences that loosely tie the main episodes together - and offer an excuse to explore other peculiar corners of the game's richly textured world. Previous interludes - Limits and Demonstrations, The Entertainment, and Here and There Along the Echo - are entirely free to play, if you're curious.

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