I've only played the first act of Kentucky Route Zero. I liked it an awful lot—I raved about it in a review you might still find floating around out there somewhere—but I don't like episodic releases, and so after it was finished I decided to put the whole thing aside until I could play it all in one big, bizarre narrative hallucination. I did not expect to have to wait seven years, but here we are in 2020, and Cardboard Computer has now, finally, announced that the fifth and final act will be out on January 28.

Kentucky Route Zero is a slow, dreamlike amble through the magical back roads of the titular state, where some things happen and some things don't, and sometimes it's hard to tell the difference. It's remarkably immersive—I could almost feel the humidity of the sultry summer night in act 1—and spins its tale slowly, so that you might not notice the shift from "strange" to "surreal" as you and your dog attempt to deliver a piece of antique furniture to an address that nobody is sure actually exists.

"There are no explicit puzzles here—except for the meaning of the things you experience along the way or riddles proffered by your occasional companions," we wrote in our 84% review. "Characters fade from reality like apparitions, a radio booms out choral music in a deserted church, a burning tree marks a turning along the highway, and an old tannoy pings the depths of a disused mine, stirring memories of a forgotten disaster."

Kentucky Route Zero is available on Steam, GOG, Humble, and Itch.io. If you'd like to get a sense of what it's all about, sort of, Un Pueblo de Nada is a production of the fictional Echo River community, funded in part by a court-ordered grant from the Consolidated Power Company—a demo of sorts.

Indie developer Cardboard Computer is responsible for Kentucky Route Zero, an episodic game of magical realism, secret highways, and strange Americana. The first episode of a planned five was released on January 7, 2013, and now there's a countdown suggesting the final episode could be out this week.

To access that countdown you'll need to be in the US and call the Kentucky Route Zero development status hotline on 1-858-WHEN-KRZ. You'll hear the following message: "The current status of Kentucky Route Zero is preparing for publication. More detailed information will be available shortly. You may wait with us if you want to. Please hold."

After chilling out with some hold music for a minute you'll be informed that your estimated wait time is three thousand and something minutes, a number that goes down if you stay on the line. The sleuths of Twitter and the Kentucky Route Zero wiki have recorded this message and done the math to calculate that it should hit zero this Tuesday, January 7, exactly seven years after the first episode was released.

If you'd like to learn more about Kentucky Route Zero, here's Joe Donnelly's making-of feature from a few years ago.

Kentucky Route Zero, one of the best indie games ever made, headlines this week's Humble Discovery Bundle: pay $10 and you can play it alongside five other games. You'll get the season pass edition, which means you'll get access to the fifth and final episode when it finally comes out. 

The bundle also contains the Dungeon Keeper-inspired War for the Overworld and deep space survival game Osiris: New Dawn, which are worth a look.

Rounding out the bundle are physics-based building game Tricky Towers, tactical RPG Phantom Brave and co-op hack-and-slash RWBY: Grimm Eclipse.

The cheapest Kentucky: Route Zero has ever been is around $7.50, so if you see $2.50 worth of value in the other games, it's a good buy. Grab it here.

Humble is also selling three of the Tales JRPG series games—Tales of Symphonia, Tales of Zestiria and Tales of Berseria—for $23.99, which is an 80% discount.

And lastly, don't forget you can pick up the full first season of Hitman for $12 if you sign up to November's Humble Monthly Bundle. 

It's been seven years since the "magic realist adventure game" Kentucky Route Zero successfully completed its $6500 Kickstarter campaign. Four acts have been released since then, the most recent in July 2016, and in September of last year developer Cardboard Computer said it was "totally focused" on finishing the game. It appears that the work might finally be approaching completion, as the studio dropped a tweet today that leads to a surreal trip inside a tiny independent television station somewhere deep in the Bluegrass State. 

The "station" is actually broadcasting, sort of, at wevp.tv, in parallel with the events of the mini-game interlude that can be found through the above link. If you don't care for Rita's broadcast, a selection of others can be found behind the "copy-it-right" message at the bottom of the page (or here). Selections include Junebug Teaser, Aunt Connie PSA #2, A Five Minute Romp Through the IP, and WEVP Technical Difficulties. 

It all comes off as very true to the spirit of public access television, leavened with Kentucky Route Zero's supernatural undertones. And the simulation runs pleasingly deep: I don't want to spoil too much but I will suggest that if you're intrigued, you might want to try that phone number. Also, the Bureau of Secret Tourism is real. Just putting that out there. 

There's no hard release date for Kentucky Route Zero Act 5 just yet, unless it's buried somewhere in WEVP video databank. (If so, I haven't found it yet.) But it's reasonably to say that it's probably coming soon—in the meantime, find out why Joe chose it as his "Staff Pick" for our 2016 Game of the Year Awards. 

Time was, indie developers used to be just that: indie. They'd develop games and release them themselves with complete creative freedom. OK, maybe not complete creative freedom, but the dawn of indie was an age of possibility, when suddenly anyone was able to distribute games across the globe at nominal cost. Niche games found audiences the traditional game industry overlooked; experimentation led to new game forms and expression. Halcyon days, as the cliché goes. 

"Indie dev is a minefield now," says Paul Kilduff-Taylor, co-founder of Mode 7 Games, the indie developer behind the Frozen Synapse series. "To have a chance at a good level of success, you basically have to nail everything. That's a really tall order, so devs are simply looking to stack the odds in their favour."

And many are doing that by partnering with publishers who focus on indie developers. Many of the leading indie games today are published by the likes of Devolver Digital, Curve, Raw Fury, Double Fine, Finji, Adult Swim, Team 17, Humble, PlayWay. They might seem to portend the sad end of a noble movement, of big business moving in to profit off the indie spirit, but the truth is very different. 

Do indies need publishers?

The first and most obvious appeal of a publisher is as a source of funding, whether that's money that will pay a developer's rent while they finish a game or pay their collaborators. But publishers do a lot more than that. So far in 2017 over 6,800 games have been released on Steam, compared to 5,028 in 2016 and 2,991 in 2015. A lot of games are being made at the moment, and the great majority of them would self-identify as 'indie games.' So how can a developer stand out in all that noise? How do you make a trailer that shows off your game in its best possible light? How do you make a trailer at all? How do you make a game that appeals widely? These are the kinds of questions that routinely keep developers awake at night. 

"I haven't yet been pitched by an indie who is already doing a lot of their own press, or has a significant marketing plan in place," says Kilduff-Taylor, who began publishing games at Mode 7 with the release of Tokyo 42 earlier this year. 

"One of the biggest fears and unknowns is to sell and market a game," agrees Andreea Chifu, head of sales and distribution at Raw Fury, which publishes Gonner, upcoming The Last Night and most recently, Uurnog Uurnlimited. 

"Yeah, absolutely," agrees Uurnog's creator, Nicklas 'Nifflas' Nygren. "I don't have time for it, and it's very, very difficult. It's scary and weird. I only really like creating new games, and since I do so many things because I work on music and code and design, it's very good if someone can help me, someone who I can offload marketing stuff and getting devkits to. I don't know how all that works and I don't have time to." 

Publishers also perform many other tasks that go into releasing a modern game: testing, localisation, porting to other platforms, developing relationships with distribution platform holders like Steam, working on branding strategy, administering store pages (this is a far bigger headache than you might imagine, with the need to create platform-specific images, write descriptions of different lengths, deal with uploading finished code and updates and associated bundles and DLC and oh my). There's also legal support, finding collaborators such as artists, music composers and writers, and managing their contracts.

In short, publishers do the crap that gets in the way of making a game. Necessary crap which requires specialized knowledge, contacts, experience and skills which are not often in line with those that go toward making a game. The way Nigel Lowrie, a cofounder of Devolver Digital, sees it, publishers are a tool that indies can use. "A developer should look at what a publisher has to offer, is it of use to them, do they think they can do it better, and will it help make their game a success? And more than that, help them make a better game?"

Every developer has different needs, and publishers—good publishers—must be very flexible to accommodate them. Experienced developers might simply want funding, while younger ones might want more hands-on support, with the publisher providing extensive design feedback and direction. Some just want help with marketing, others just want to offload platform porting jobs, like Cardboard Computer, which originally released Kentucky Route Zero entirely independently and only recently signed with Annapurna Interactive to port it to consoles, localizing it into new languages and drumming up attention. "All three of those tasks involve a lot of management, and are also all new territory for us, so it's great to have some help and guidance from this crew who have a lot of experience," says writer and programmer Jake Elliott.

"I think increasingly indies are looking for a publisher who really understands their particular project and can give it a lot of time, rather than one who is going to slot it in as part of a portfolio approach," says Kilduff-Taylor. As such, many indie-focused publishers have a certain style or specialty. "Devolver are outstanding with games that have a certain type of vibe and aesthetic to them," he suggests. "Team 17 are good at identifying and working with what I'd call 'mid-size' indie games and turning them into mega-hits, and so on. So really it's about the developer identifying which configuration is going to suit them best."

Even in the case of Cardboard Computer, late to getting a publisher for Kentucky Route Zero, they started talking to Annapurna all the way back in 2011 when it was originally Kickstarted. "We really appreciate Annapurna's artist-oriented focus and the other work they are publishing," says Elliott. "It's kind of an intangible, but there's something really encouraging about being sort of 'label-mates' with artists we greatly admire."

Nygren takes a similarly human-centered approach. "I really look primarily for people who first just like the game," he says. "That's a very important thing, that they feel investment themselves in the game and don't just see it as a way to make money."

"It's people working with other people," says Devolver's Lowrie. "It has to be a tailored relationship with all sorts of variables and things that each side brings to the table, good and bad. Personalities, desires and everything like that." He's adamant that everyone should be open with what they want from the outset, so everyone understands what they want and how they see they'll get there.

"A publisher should make you feel that you are part of a family, that you have a team, colleagues to bounce ideas off and to waive some of the stress that comes with a new release," agrees Chifu. "When we see that we've manage to build a nice community, it feels good. All our devs get to know the other teams we might work with, and most of the time they become friends and even help each other. This is sustainable because we prioritize transparency and trust."

Where the money goes

So it's all sunshine and flowers in indie publishing! Okay, maybe not at every level, but certainly, these top flight publishers know that cultivating indie talent might lead to landing the next Hotline Miami, Stardew Valley, or Firewatch. There are also gougers out there, who are outed now and then with claims of them failing to honor their part in deals or withholding funds.

"There's lots of secret discussion among indies about who's good and bad, about bad deals, about avoiding this and that," warns Nygren. There are many stories of things simply going wrong, often as a result of inexperience and breakdowns in communication. 

For those worrying about deals going south, the deal itself is often a source of confidence. Neither Raw Fury nor Devolver ask for IP rights, which is to say that developers get to keep ownership of their game, brand, code and art, so they can do anything they like with it in the future. Many indies swear by this because once signed away they've no rights to build on their work and ideas in the future. This is a big contrast to the typical practice of major publishers, who are anxious to maintain control and maximize returns on what are often vast investments in a given game.

Devolver and Raw Fury give a revenue share to all their developers. Raw Fury gives all its developers an equal partnership in a game so each party shares the same risks. After external costs are deducted, such as paid user acquisition, events and porting, all remaining revenue is shared 50/50 between developer and Raw Fury. Internal costs, such as making trailers in-house, are not deducted. This is right up Nygren's street. "I consider that if the game does well, it puts us in the same boat," he says.

Devolver's deals are based on a period of budgeting with the developer. It starts with the developer giving Devolver a budget detailing what they feel it'd cost to release the game in a certain timeframe with a certain feature-set. Devolver then goes over that budget, working in costs for creating builds to take to PAX and other shows, for QA and a hundred little unknowables. "Inexperienced developers tend to only work out what it takes to get the game done," says Lowrie. They also don't tend to think about factoring the time it usually takes between a game launching and the money being sent by the store-owner, which can be 30-90 days of starving.

Once agreed, the next step is to figure out the investment Devolver will make into the budget, and how both sides will recoup their costs once the game releases, with the aim of both Devolver and developer coming to zero. And once that's reached, what the revenue share will be. In most Devolver deals, 60-70 percent of revenue goes to the developer. (This, of course, is after the percentage taken by Steam and other storefronts.)

There's a lot to consider in all of this. Signing with a publisher is complicated and risk-laden. These relationships take trust and communication. And with it comes the cost of not getting to keep 100 percent of revenue. But indie game production is becoming ever more complex and expensive and the market is becoming ever more saturated. Self-publishing is most certainly still within reach for many savvy and hard-working developers, but many others are finding the support of people—partners—who take all the crap out of their hands and share a stake in their success is invaluable.

After teasing a string of weird art house videos earlier this year, Kentucky Route Zero unveiled its TV Edition last week—an "enhanced" console edition that's due alongside its fifth and final act. Cardboard Computer now wants to assure would be players that the console port will not stand in the way of Act 5's development. 

Having launched KRZ's first act in 2013, the series will conclude in "early 2018"—a steady-paced development arc that's upset some players, against the modest size of each chapter. To this end, the fact Act 5's launch on PC won't be compromised but its coinciding TV Edition is good news, then. 

"We’ll release [the TV Edition] at the same time as we update the PC version with Act 5, which we’re planning to do in the early part of 2018," says Cardboard Computer via a blog post. "There are some nice enhancements to the game that are coming as part of this TV Edition, and all of these will be ported back to the PC version also—the two versions are basically identical other than the platforms they run on. Wanted to make sure we were clear with you all about that!"

The developer explains that Nathan Gray from the console port's publisher, Annapurna, was one of the PC entry's first Kickstarter backers. Gray is in charge of the porting process so that Cardboard Computer can direct its attention on finishing Act 5. 

The post continues: "It’s important to us to be clear with you all about that as well—we’re totally focused on finishing Act 5! Working with Annapurna on this allows us to finish the game while console work happens in parallel."

Annapurna is also helping the developer localise KRZ in French, Italian, German, Spanish, Latin American Spanish, Japanese, and Korean. 

Kentucky Route Zero's fifth and final act is without a hard release date, however is expected in early 2018. 

When I asked Cardboard Computer's Jake Elliott how Kentucky Route Zero's development was going earlier this year he told me: "Yeah, we're definitely still working on the game. More soon, this will be a busy summer yet." The developer has now confirmed its fifth and final act is due early next year. 

The announcement was made as part of Nintendo's 'Nindies' event, which showcased the indie games heading to its Switch console from hereon. A so-called "TV Edition" of KRZ will include all five acts alongside their interlude entries—all of which will be fed back into the PC variation. 

I'm not sure if the following constitutes a teaser in that very little is teased, however here's the Switch's TV Edition reveal trailer: 

It's no secret that I'm a big fan of Kentucky Route Zero, thus the idea of tying up all of its loose ends excites me. I especially loved the way Act 4 shifted gears, taking on a more contemplative tone against its forerunners. That said, number five will almost certainly up the ante as it arrives at whatever undoubtedly off-the-wall conclusions it has in mind.  

No hard launch date just yet, however Kentucky Route Zero's Act 5 is due in early 2018. 

Make no mistake: I'm very fond of Kentucky Route Zero. So much, that despite last year's deluge of top class games I still reckon the off-the-wall narrative adventure's fourth and penultimate act may well be my favourite thing to emerge from 2016. I wrote about why here, and latterly about how its weird and idiosyncratic open road was made. 

Cardboard Computer remains ever-tight lipped about when we can expect KRZ's elusive fifth and final act, however has spent the past year teasing weird game-related art-inspired videos via its WEVP-TV website. 

From shorts that feature real life incarnations of Kentucky Route Zero's characters, to non-game-related art house documentaries that've clearly inspired the game's development, WEVP has shared ten trailers so far—the latest of which is Phil Morton's quirky General Motors from 1976. Admittedly, most of this is a little over my head but it's nevertheless cool to see the sights and sounds that've inspired KRZ's often odd makeup along the way. 

Hmm, make of that what you will. As for the game itself—Cardboard Computer's Jake Elliot tells us he and his team are hard at work on the next Interlude and the much-anticipated Act 5. "Yeah, [we're] definitely still working on the game," he says. "More soon, this will be a busy summer yet."

The Humble Indie Bundles just keep coming, and we're now onto the 18th instalment of cheap indie game goodness. The Humble Indie Bundle 18 contains seven games right now, based on how much you pay, with more being added next week. 

At the "pay what you want" tier, you'll get Ziggurat, Windward, and SteamWorld Heist. Ziggurat is a first person dungeon crawler from 2014 with procedurally generated levels. In Windward, you're sailing around an open world, which also happens to be procedurally generated. Actually, there might be a theme here, as SteamWorld Heist is a strategy game from last year which contains procedurally generated levels too. 

In the "pay more than the average" tier, which is currently sitting at $7.48/£5.81, you'll find three games which aren't randomly generated. Kentucky Route Zero is an adventure game taking place over four acts which ooze style and mystery. Beholder has you taking on the role of a landlord of an apartment block, who must spy on his tenants in order to keep his government bosses happy. Also in this tier is Goat Simulator, and all the DLC that comes with it. It's an incredibly realistic simulation of how a goat lives its life, but not really. More games will be added to this tier next Tuesday.

If you pay more than $13/£10, you'll also unlock Owlboy, a story driven 16-bit Metroidvania style platformer which came out towards the end of last year.

You've got until May 30 to take advantage of all these indie game deals, which total $127 if you were to pay for them all separately. You're also able to select how much of your payment will go to charity, which is always nice.  

Some online stores give us a small cut if you buy something through one of our links. Read our affiliate policy for more info. 

Kentucky Route Zero is a brilliant point-and-click game. So brilliant that, even unfinished (we're still eagerly awaiting its fifth and final chapter), it's easy to recommend picking it up for the £18.99 it's currently selling for on Steam. 

Good news, then, for Amazon Prime subscribers who don't yet own the game: you can pick it up for free today. There's no strings attached, and you'll get automatic access to the game's final chapter when it releases. It's a cracking deal.

To get it, all you need is a Twitch Prime account, which is included in your Amazon Prime membership and offers free games every month. Log into Amazon, click this link, and download the game using the Twitch desktop app. Voila: one of the most atmospheric adventure games around for absolutely nothing. But hurry — the offer runs out on Monday.

Oh, and if you haven't already, check out Joe Donnelly's piece on the making of Zero, the highway that binds the game together. It's a great read.