This week on the Mod Roundup, Pokémon and Monster Hunter's monsters aren't the only new creatures you can find in Ark—now there be dragons as well, five different kinds you can tame and breed.

Also, Fallout 4's cooking gets far more immersive with new sounds, effects, and animations. And finally, a mod for Skyrim makes learning spells a more complicated and rewarding process than it currently is.

Here are the most promising mods we've seen this week.

Dragontail, for Ark: Survival Evolved

Steam Workshop link

Modders sure like adding new creatures to Ark, and we're glad they do. How about some dragons, then? Here you go: five tamable, breedable, paintable dragons for you. Some are small enough to carry around, while others can be ridden, though none require saddles. These dragons don't replace existing creatures, and don't interfere with dino spawns.

Better Cooking Stations, for Fallout 4

Nexus Mods link

This mod makes a lot of really nice changes to Fallout 4's cooking stations. It adds new sounds (sizzling), new effects (embers, sparks, heat shimmer, plus an actual fire below the spit, which was missing), and new animations both for when you use them and when they're inactive (you can see the lovely swaying of the hanging meat and pot above). You can even tag them as private so your settlers can't use them—they're always helping themselves to your crafting benches, you know? Darn rude settlers.

Spell Research, for Skyrim

Nexus Mods link

It does seem a bit odd that becoming a powerful spellcaster in Skyrim mostly involves simply buying spells from other mages. Shouldn't there be a bit more involved in learning a spell? This mod turns the task into something more complex, requiring you to perform research in order to learn new spells. You can craft scrolls and tomes, break down alembic ingredients into their base components, and hunt for ancient texts and artifacts. The point is, becoming a master spellcaster requires hours and hours of work, which is as it should be.

Also this past week, I took a look at a mod that adds moving vehicles to Fallout: New Vegas! Plus, we reported on a mod that is adding Superhot's time-bending system to Portal as part of the Make It Superhot competition.

While I had a pretty good idea where Marguerite’s boss fight was going, mutated Jack caught me completely off guard. I thought he was done in the first boss battle, but the dude is resilient. There’s no warning whatsoever, just a massive, clearly distressed Tentacle-Jack in a boat house with a few too many eyeballs and a hankering for human flesh. The good news is that the eyes are clearly weak spots, glowing bright and begging to pop like videogames of yore. The bad news is Jack hits hard, so without smart movement and timing, it’s easy to get cornered and murdered with a few swipes. Keep these things in mind for a simpler time getting this pompous jerk to quiet down. 

Don’t forget to block

If you’re like me, you run from enemies before they can even get close enough to hit you, and if they do get in a swipe, it’s a surprise. Resi 7 on Normal doesn’t incentivize use of the block mechanic often enough for it to stay fresh in the player’s memory, but it can save your life in the Jack fight. Right when the fight begins, Jack gets in a free swipe, so have your arms up at the ready. If he ever backs you into a corner or stuns you, block. It’s obvious advice, but so easy to forget.

Bring the grenade launcher

If you found the grenade launcher, now is the time to use it. Right before the boss fight begins, you’ll find a few free rounds. Consider it a strong nudge. They fire off rounds that burst into flames and do damage over time. With so many tiny eyes hidden all over his body, they make quick work of Jack's tougher weak spots. Save them for later in the fight, when reaching the eyes on his top or bottom proves troublesome. 

Spend your resources on ammunition

Or at least prioritize creating ammo before first aid vials. Jack is going to absorb a ton of ammo before going down, and getting caught with an empty supply will nearly guarantee your death—thought I’d love to see a knife-only run. His movement and behaviors are easy to predict within a few minutes, so no more than one or two health vials should be necessary.

Use the ladder to ‘move’ Jack

It’s much easier for Jack to hit you if you’re on the same floor as him, and the only way between those floors is a ladder. If he’s not too close to the ladder, and you need to shoot eyes on a specific side of his body, use the ladder to push or pull him up or down. There’s a fulcrum somewhere in the middle that triggers Jack to recognize the player as moving up or down. Find the sweet spot and move just beyond it, then wait for his movement animation to trigger. Quickly drop down or climb up and get some shots in on those beautiful, wet orbs.

Reload when he’s stunned

Don’t get too greedy when you pop an eyeball. See if you can get off another shot or two, but use the time Jack is stunned and busy making his way to you to reload every weapon in your arsenal. There’s nothing worse than being inches from the final eye only to trigger the shotgun reload animation when you fire. It’s especially important during the final part of the fight, where he slams a black tendril and plops the final glowing weak point right in front of you.

It doesn’t take long for Ethan to scrounge up some bullet-shaped protection in Resident Evil 7, but to truly make evil bleed, you’ll want to swap out your dinky starting pistol for something less flimsy and more Evil Dead. In true survival horror fashion, the Baker residence hosts an arsenal steadily ramping up in potency as you continue your search for Mia. You can easily miss these handheld cannons in your travels, so use this guide to make sure your armory is fully stocked before escaping the Bakers for good. 

Be warned, spoilers ahead!

Burner 

You can acquire the Burner as soon as you step into the Yard area outside the Main House after collecting the three dog head door pieces (one of which involves a mostly straightforward boss fight).

Head to the Old House. From the Yard’s central trailer save room, move northeast and take the path to a rusted gate. Cross the cheerfully decorated wooden bridge beyond to get to the house’s front door.

A few oversized bugs will fly into your face and buzz their welcome to this new section of the Baker compound. Don’t bother expending precious ammo. A single slash from your pocket knife will splatter them.

If you’ve viewed the “Mia” video tape, this should be recognizable ground by now. Turn left and move along the walkway lining the room’s watery center. Head through the door to the north.

Glance at the warning hastily sprayed on the wall, but don’t linger—an insect nest in this room will continually spew bugs to peck away at your health. You can destroy the nest with the weaponry you already have, but it’s best to just sprint past and through the door on the opposite side of the room. Quickly close the door behind you to shut out any pursuing pests. If a swarm followed you in, just slash away with the knife until it disperses.

Use the right door in this corridor to enter the Dining Room. Exit via the northern door on the left wall past the sink. Be sure to check around for supplies, including both a strong and regular Chem Fluid in the spider-infested cabinet. (Inch close and slash away with the knife to clear the crawlies out.)

Outside, quickly sprint ahead and take the rightward walkway just before the insect nest to get to the Water Station jutting out of the swampy bog. Close the door after squeezing into the station’s cramped interior. The reward for your nimbleness is the Burner Nozzle, the first half of your new toy. It sits in plain view. Swipe it.

Backtrack to the Dining Room, and return to the corridor you first entered from. Continue straight to the door at the far end. Some bugs will crash through the windows on the corridor’s right side, but the narrow space makes it easy to take care of them with your knife.

Through the door is the Gallery room where you’ll soon solve another shadow puzzle to progress. Walk past it for now, and throw open the double doors leading to another exterior walkway.

Turn left after stepping outside, and you’ll spot the clearly visible Burner Grip carelessly discarded atop a trash bin. Haven’t any of these people seen MacGyver? You know what comes next: Combine both Grip and Nozzle in your inventory to create the Burner. Soon, it'll come in handy for an encounter with another Baker family member.

Grenade Launcher 

The mighty Grenade Launcher can be yours for the low price of a short jog through familiar territory after nabbing the Crow Key from the Old House. Retrace your steps back to the Yard and the Main House. You’re heading for the Drawing Room, which you can get to either via sliding through the back wall past the Main Hall projector or taking the long route through the Monitoring Room.

The Crow Door awaits at the Drawing Room’s far end. Open it with the Crow Key, and reap your new fun-tube off the crates right in front of you. Grenade ammo will be quite scarce when you first pick up the launcher, so keep it tucked away until needed against strong foes such as the Greenhouse boss fight or the beefier Molded variants later in the game.

M21 Shotgun

With a wink and a nod to a classic Resident Evil puzzle, getting the M21 Shotgun entails a bit of a convoluted sequence of swaps and item sleuthing, but it’s well worth it in the end. 

Your first step is to get the Scorpion Key from the Processing Area section of the Main House’s basement. It sticks out from a bag of flesh resting on a table in the center of the large room accessed past the corridor with the metal divider after the encounter in the Incinerator Room.

Return to the Main Hall and climb upstairs to the second floor. Head west and enter the Recreation Room via the first door along the exterior walkway to the right, but keep an eye out for a roaming Jack who might be blocking your way. Once inside, use the Scorpion Key on the door adorned with—surprise—a large scorpion to enter Grandma Baker’s room. 

Grab the Broken Shotgun that’s propped up against the door frame inside and to the left. Take it back down to the Main Hall and swap it for the working shotgun held by the statue in the well-lit room on the south end. (If you don’t have something to replace the shotgun, the room’s door will slam shut until you put it back.)

After the Dissection Room encounter and getting access to the Yard, head to the dark patch of vegetation in between the two sets of stairs leading up to the Main House porch. (It’s ahead and slightly left looking from the trailer door.) Crouch down and spot the loose metal panel covering up a crawlspace beneath the porch. Move it aside and grab the Repair Kit from the crate stored within. It’s best to store the kit in a safe room item box for now. You won’t need it quite yet.

Your M21 hunt is on hiatus until you brave the Old House and collect Marguerite’s lantern. That, in turn, serves as the first step to finding the Snake Key which you’ll need to get back on the M21’s trail.

To get it, return to the Processing Area in the Main House using the northeast steps beside the safe room to descend into the basement. Travel through the Boiler Room (if you’re lost, this is the same path you took to get the red dog head piece earlier on), continue down to the Morgue, head up the stairs on the room’s east side, and enter the first door on the right to reach the other half of the Dissection Room.

Here rests the deputy’s gruesome remains. Don’t be shy! Shove your arm down his throat to extract the Snake Key.

With Snake Key in gore-soaked hand, you can now unlock the second-floor Kid’s Room in the Main House. Journey back to the Main Hall, head upstairs, and take the west door. Turn south in the corridor, and unlock the room before you with the Snake Key.

Pick up the lamp from the cluttered table at the room’s right side and rotate it to spot a red button obscured by the shade. Press it to drop down a ladder in the corner.

Climb up into an attic area. Check the corner to the right of the ladder for a Model Shotgun resting on a shelf. Grab it. You’re now ready to get your hands on the M21 which, if you haven’t guessed by now, is the Broken Shotgun you used to get yourself a working boomstick from the statue’s cold, dead hands downstairs. Make sure you have your Repair Kit, too.

Backtrack downstairs to the Main Hall south room. Once again, swap the Model Shotgun for the Broken Shotgun to keep the door from sealing your fate. Combine the Repair Kit with the gun, and bask in the glory of your deluxe double-barrel beauty. It’ll pack a way stronger wallop per shell than the standard shotgun, but you’ll need extra precision to make both shots count before needing to reload.

P19 Machine Gun

You might’ve spotted the Machine Gun taunting you from a locked cabinet in the Captain’s Cabin during your travels on the wrecked ship. Luckily, pilfering the powerful weapon involves a relievingly short procedure with less headaches than the M21. To begin with, you need a key.

Drop down the elevator shaft on the Bridge’s southern side (or go straight and look right if you’re leaving the Captain’s Cabin). Use the Lug Wrench to yank open the hatch atop the elevator’s roof. Drop down to be presented with the choice of either climbing up to floor 2F or dropping further to 1F. You want 2F.

Climb up and turn right, heading down the corridor to the Guest Room ahead and slightly around the turn. If the Molded guarding the wall somehow detects you, simply step into the Guest Room and close the door—it’s a safe room, so the silly thing will instantly dissolve once you’re inside.

Pick up the Corrosive lying beneath the small end table straight in front of you. Return back down the corridor (saving at the nearby cassette player is a good idea), and walk past the elevator shaft to the sealed Bunk Room door at the other end. If you’re quick, you can use the Corrosive on the door’s lock and dash inside before the Molded shamble close; if not, scamper back to the Guest Room to clear out some breathing space.

Some Remote Bombs eagerly await your inventory’s embrace inside. More importantly, snag the Captain’s Cabin Locker Key beneath the lamp on the desk. Get back to the Bridge: hop back into the elevator from the corridor, and climb the ladder into the shaft. Climb the longer ladder to drop into the Bridge once more using the hole in the floor.

Be swift but silent, as Molded are now patrolling the Bridge area in search of you. Swing around to the Captain’s Cabin, and use the key to swing open the locker and claim the P19 Machine Gun to finally arm yourself with some real firepower.

There's still one powerful weapon left to obtain, the .44 magnum, but it's locked away behind a hefty coin ransom, nine of them, in the RV. Make sure to check every room for antique coins throughout the game so you don't miss out.

Back in November, we reported on Ark: Survival Evolved's Tek Tier update, which adds cybernetic power suits and laser cannon-equipped dinosaur helmets, among other things. Now, GameSpot reports that it arrives next week.

The update launches on January 30. It comes with a bunch of new Tek Tier power armor sets, which can grant players several different abilities. 

• Tek Vision: Identify AI enemies and creatures, in addition to players
• Tek Boots: No fall damage and the ability to climb up steep cliffs and slopes
• Tek Pants: Faster running speed
• Tek Gauntlet: Punching power increased
• Tek Rifle: Laser-shooting gun with long scope
• Jetpack
• Night Vision

The Tek abilities can be combined in various ways and are intended for Ark's end-game, and Studio Wildcard creative director Jesse Rapczak expects players to use them in boss encounters. Though you will need to defeat some bosses without the armor first, as they drop Element, a resource needed to construct the sets.

Boss battles have also been tweaked in the new update, with each now having three difficulties. Bosses you've already defeated will drop new items as well, so it might be worth it to pay them another visit.

One cool new weapon the patch delivers is the lance, which you can use to joust with another player, except there are dinosaurs instead of horses.

While the Tek Tier patch adds new weapons and dinosaurs, the thing that caught my eye the most is the sheep. GameSpot's video starts with a showstopper and demonstrates what it looks like when you cut a sheep's hair for wool. It looks good. Makes me want to play Ark myself.

Rapczak says this is "the patch to kick off the final stretch," which sounds like he's referring to the game's official launch. The game released in Steam's Early Access in June 2015, and the finished version is expected to launch sometime this year.

When stat tracking is implemented into video games the right way, there isn't much that beats it. I'll always be interested in seeing how many people did some asinine, completely unnecessary thing in any game that pulls me in, and Resident Evil 7 is the latest of those adventures.

If you were wondering what that prompt for Resident Evil.net was at the beginning of Resident Evil 7, then you might be surprised to hear that Capcom has been tracking every player that's accepted it. No, not the scary, dystopian tracking that you see in episodes of Black Mirror or any number of sci-fi movies (we hope). Capcom is instead using the data to visualize some interesting data. For example, at the time of publishing, Resident Evil 7 players have racked up more than 570 years of playtime. And that's not even counting any player that chose not to be tracked.

What's great about the stat-tracking page is that it connects to your account, so it knows how much progress you've made through the story. This means that Capcom hides certain information from you to avoid spoilers; once you've completed certain sections of the game, more stats are revealed to you.

It's funny to see that the vast majority of people aim for a Molded's head when confronted by the gruesome, regenerating monster—at this point, everyone knows exactly how to best take care of Resident Evil's creatures. But not everyone is successful. The Molded is the number one cause of death, claiming responsibility for more than 22 percent of player fatalities.

Capcom has also been tracking how many times the game's lone bra was examined. Players have looked at it more than 600,000 times, but only 43 percent of players have actually done so. With a tracked player count of about 800,000, that means many players have examined the useless bra more than once. You filthy animals.

Of the roughly 800,000 tracked players, about 10 percent of them have played in VR. That makes us particularly sad as no one on PC will get to experience that for themselves until next year. 

The last stat I want to share is the number of billiard balls pocketed. If you didn't know you could play billiards, don't worry: you're not alone. I certainly didn't know, and it turns out 99.53 percent of players didn't either. As of publishing time, only 4,424 players played billiards. Now I know exactly what I'm doing next time I load up the game.

There are plenty more stats available on the page, and you can check them all out here.

Resident Evil 7 received a score of 90/100 in PC Gamer's review. Critic Andy Kelly called it "the best Resident Evil in years."

"It takes an industrial pressure washer to the series, blasting off years of accumulated filth and grime," he said. "And you’re left with a lean, polished survival horror that borrows from its legacy, but isn’t afraid to look to modern horror games for inspiration too."

If Mad Max has taught us anything, it's that even in the ruins of the post-apocalypse, enterprising survivors will always get a few cars working again. Modder Uhmatt has made this concept a reality with a mod for Fallout: New Vegas called Traffic, which adds moving vehicles to the crumbling streets. Now you'll see a few cars and trucks rumbling along the shattered asphalt along with the usual on-foot caravans. Very cool.

The mod is still in its early stages, described by Uhmatt as a 'beta/early preview.' As such, it's a little rough. There are no NPCs behind the wheel—the vehicles are technically creatures following preset routes—and they have a bit of trouble navigating the rougher bits of road, often halting to spin around and find a way across gaps and bumps. It's still pretty neat, however, to be running along, hear the rumble of an engine, and see a battered old pickup truck cruise past, complete with animated wheels.

After I installed the mod, it took a while for the first vehicle to show up, but within a few minutes I began spotting cars and trucks intermittently. Don't worry, it's not like there are huge traffic jams: typically I've only seen one car at a time, or occasionally two or three driving through the same general area. It fits in with New Vegas nicely, feeling like a few resourceful citizens got an old jalopy running and are simply heading to work (or to the casino).

You can find the Traffic mod over at Nexus Mods. I look forward to seeing it where it goes in the future. Thanks to the Nexus Mods twitter account for the tip!

Stardock's space strategy game Galactic Civilizations 3 has undergone some big changes courtesy of the newly-released 2.0 update, including the addition of a new resource, Starbase Administrators, who are now required in order to construct starbases. Stardock said the admins, which will be available in restricted amounts, will make small empires viable by reducing the pressure to crank starbases out in large numbers. 

Diplomacy has also been reworked to improve the AI's ability to determine the quality of trade offers and react accordingly, while the Ship Builder interface has been changed to simplify navigation while simultaneously providing more information in the shipyard window, including currency, morale, and population. 

"Version 2.0 is the culmination of many months of working closely with our community on the kinds of features players like but often don't get a lot of attention," Stardock boss Brad Wardell said. "The diplomatic AI is more sophisticated and plays a lot like a human would both in terms of trading and how they deal with the complex web of foreign relations. We also added a new concept called administration that is designed to let players have smaller empires that are competitive."   

To mark the release of the Galactic Civilization 3 2.0 update, Stardock has both the base game and the Gold bundle on sale on Steam until January 30. A full list of the changes in the update is below.

 Administrators 

• Starbases now require one "Administrator" to build
• Number of starting Administrators depends on galaxy size
• Research certain Government Technologies to increase the number of Administrators
• Current number of available Administrators can be seen on the resource bar or the starbase list tab

Diplomacy

• General pass on conversation weights such that the AI will talk more and offer more interesting trades
• AI players who dislike you will charge you more in diplomacy
• Changed diplomacy attitude label from "allied" to "loves (they're not allied)
• Changed diplomacy attitude from label "war" to "hates" (they're not at war)
• AI should be better at focusing on a given weapon or defense tech rather than trying to research multiple paths
• AIs will heavily weight their relations with other players based on who is at war with whom and why
• AIs will tend to come to the aid of their friends even if the enemy is more powerful
• AI now has the capability of explaining in detail why they rejected (or accepted) a trade offer (though will require translation of new strings)
• AI will use a redlining system of evaluating proposals such that each sub-AI routine will add marks to the proposal with potential veto power
• AI now has the capability of explaining in detail why they rejected (or accepted) a trade offer
• By default, the auto-generated military ships will have their categories folded for easier UI navigation

Balance

• Home planet production points base increased from 1 to 10
• Significantly reduced starbase spacing radius to 2 tiles, allowing you cluster them closer together
• AI is substantially better at evaluating what ship to build, when and where
• Early game improvements made less expensive
• Late game improvement benefits reduced slightly
• Research improvements have been rebalanced

UI Improvements / Bug Fixes

• By default, the auto-generated military ships will have their categories folded for easier UI navigation
• When a player designs a ship, it will, by default, be added to the favorites
• Added the currency, morale, population, and turns information to the planet and shipyard window
• Changed Terran and "space monster" fighters size from small to tiny, matching the sizes for other factions. This change prevents a crash in the ROT campaign
• Map Editor: Fixed a problem that prevented the Mini-map Preview from working.
• Replaced Diplomatic Specialization 3 to be "Efficient Administration" on all trees (Base Game and Campaigns)
• Fixed bad Matter Disruption Cost multiplier that was making Matter Disruption 2.6 times more expensive than it should have been
• Changed the width of the asteroid tooltip window and "nearest owned planet" value so that the value can no longer overlap
• Negative Strategic resources are no longer shown in the trade options when they were negative
• Updated map lighting settings to decreased ambient light and increased key light to make the ships look less flat
• Mercenaries: Ships that you can't afford are greyed out
• Fixed issue where Ancient Kinetic Augmenter had weapon FX even though it is a support module
• Removed military ring Starbase range boost now that we have implemented Administrators
• Fixed a problem that was causing rebellions in peaceful corners of the galaxy

Yesterday, Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire was announced. Today, it has been fully funded, reaching its $1.1 million goal on Fig in less than a day—22 hours and 57 minutes, to be precise. To mark the moment, Obsidian has released a new teaser to remind people that while it's great that the funding goal was reached so quickly, sometimes dreams don't work out quite so well. 

"We have the best fans in the world," Obsidian CEO Feargus Urquhard said in a statement. "Our fans were responsible for the original game’s critical and financial success, and we are looking forward to doing it all over again with them for the sequel." 

The funding total at this moment stands at a little shy of $1.14 million, nearly half of which—$526,000—comes from investments rather than reward backers. That struck me as kind of odd at first, as I had assumed (without putting much thought into it, I admit) that conventional backers would be the primary source of crowdfunding for videogames. But in fact it appears to be the norm: Wasteland 3, Consortium: The Tower, Jay and Silent Bob: Chronic Blunt Punch, and even smaller projects like Trackless and Make Sail, all drew in more investment funding than reward pledges. (Psychonauts 2, for some reason, is the exception, but even it's almost a flat 50-50.)

Not that it really matters from the perspective of someone who just wants to play the game, although it does open the door to some potentially interesting conversations about how these projects would have fared on other platforms, like Kickstarter. Apocalypse Now, for instance, is a fairly high-profile project that's garnered plenty of press attention, and yet its Kickstarter is struggling by comparison, having pulled in just $105,000 on a $900,000 goal over three days. But the important thing is, Pillars 2 happening, and there's plenty of time for stretch goals: The Fig campaign runs until February 24.

Marguerite isn’t having a great day. You busted into her house, burned her bug-children, stole her dead (sort of) kid’s serum-producing arm, and dissolved her into a pile of black goo. Who’s the bad guy here? Anyway, she gets mad and her legs and arms grow longer, her undercarriage erupts into a bug-birthing abscess, and she makes it her mission to murder you in the greenhouse. It’s not as obtuse a battle as Jack Baker's boss fight, but can really put a drain on your supplies if you don’t use them correctly. Use these tips to spend your precious bullets wisely and make Marge's day the worst she’s ever had, you jerk. 

Find a safe sentry point on the second floor 

Running around is valid tactic, but it can be easy to turn a corner and bump into Marguerite unexpectedly, where the ensuing panic might mean bullets wasted and unnecessary damage taken. I found a decent place on the second floor where I could keep track of her pretty well and get away if she got too close. The key her is patience, and making her come to you rather than seeking her out. 

Save your flamethrower fuel for swarms 

Sometimes Marge will hide to birth swarms and the larger flying insects. You can chase her down and get a pistol shot in or two to interrupt the process, but if you can’t find her, make sure you save flamethrower fuel to take care of the incoming swarms. If you can, just knife the big suckers, but the swarms are quick and a huge distraction. Taking them out as soon as possible is key.

Use the pistol to knock her down 

Marge will climb all over the walls and ceiling and can be knocked down with a few well placed pistol shots. Once she hits the floor, she’ll land on her back and struggle to upright herself, which is a perfect time to get some damage in. When she disappears to birth bugs, she'll lay eggs too, which continually spawn bugs throughout the match. A shot or two from a distance will knock her down. Listen for her moaning, birthing noises and try to interrupt her before she can finish. 

Save the shotgun for damage 

If it wasn’t obvious already, shooting Marge in her festering bug wound does the most damage. Do your best to save your most powerful weapons for such an opening because she doesn’t stay still for long, even after a good stun. If you're desperate to do some damage, but can't get a bead on her bug bits, then headshots are a decent alternative. 

If she gets too close, drop down for a supply run 

There are a ton of supplies hidden all around the greenhouse, and once you get a good hit in on Marge after she approaches you (ideally from a second floor sentry point), she’s hard to get back down immediately. Use the opportunity to drop down to the first floor for a quick supply run. There’s ammo tucked away in a few drawers and a box, chemicals on the lawnmower and in the spider-covered locker, and a health tonic near this tipped ceramic. They’re not too difficult to spot once you’re close enough—just look out for the little arrow UI icon. Once you finish your quick sweep, head back upstairs to your sentry spot. 

If you want some extra help before the fight, look left before the first set of stairs where she pops out of the window. There are some psychosimulants on a couch. They'll speed up your ability to item snaffle while running around as it marks them all on screen temporarily.

Take a peek at the gallery below for a few item locations. 

Like Rapture is to BioShock, Los Santos is to Grand Theft Auto 5, and the Greenbriar residence is to Gone Home, The Zero—the mysterious highway that binds Kentucky Route Zero together—is as big a star as any one of the game's cast of dysfunctional characters. Sneaking us into bygone America—an era of neon signs, roadside diners and lazy rivers—The Zero's hazy, two-dimensional monochromatic design contrasts with KRZ's highly stylised 3D character models, animations and story settings. Few games have captured the imagination, inexhaustible possibility and spirit of the open road with similar style and conviction.

"I started off saying and thinking I wanted to downplay the roles of the setting but I guess it's true: the place is really important to me," says the game's co-creator Jake Elliott. Before moving to Kentucky himself, Elliott often travelled to the Bluegrass State to visit his wife's relatives. En route he'd wonder at the journey's contradictory landscapes and environments, and the vastness of both its surface and cavernous highways within Mammoth Cave—the world's largest known cave system. 

This varied geography inspired much of The Zero's superficial details. In Kentucky singular wide-berthing roads are all that all that splits the land from the sky. "If I go out into the highway that's closest to me, it's a really strange feeling," Elliott adds. "Places like this, where there's no hills, it feels like there's way too much sky. It's really hard to adjust to and feels like you could just fall into it, it's really strange."

This sense of overwrought scale was consistent with The Zero's earliest designs, and while Elliot and co-creator Tamas Kemenczy didn't know exactly what the map would look like in its final form, or how it would operate mechanically, it was to play a central role from the outset. 

"I thought a lot of the game would happen on The Zero," co-creator Tamas Kemenczy admits. "I thought the way that we were designing The Zero was that, after the first act, everything would be on The Zero for a long period of time. Then it sort of got remodelled so that the characters were interweaving in and out of The Zero throughout the acts. That was an interesting development a little later on that was not clearly defined from the get go."

It wasn't until Elliot and Kemenczy began digging into KRZ's second act that The Zero started taking shape. I'm reminded of Mulholland Drive when Elliot speaks of mirroring Lynchian-esque locales which pull upon the psychological and emotional tendencies of the viewer—depicting spaces which aren't always rational or physical. 

Beyond doffs of the cap to a number of American playwrights such as Eugene O'Neil, Arthur Miller, and Tennessee Williams, KRZ has a magical realism quality about it, not least out on The Zero, where psychological spaces are projected into a physical reality. Earlier iterations weighed heavier on exploration using the combination lock-like mechanic that features in later acts. While the map wasn't always intended to be a fully-formed circle, once this idea was suggested Elliot and Kemenczy decided it made perfect sense.

"The very first approach we had to driving at all was that it was going to be that you were sitting in the car and it was realistic and you could see the truck. That's what we were thinking going into development," Elliott explains. "It didn't really work well in the way we'd have liked so we did this abstract map mode, and then we didn't know how that'd apply to being on The Zero. I remember there was a version of it where it was just like the above ground map but it was almost like it was made up of a bunch of jigsaw pieces that would kind of get reassembled randomly. 

"The road was different every time you went on it, it extended infinitely and the only way you could navigate it was by following these kind of ritualistic directions—like take three lefts and then a right, or something."

Kemenczy interjects: "Which we kept ultimately, but the ritualistic driving was more about these symbols, and even the way you get back onto The Zero doesn't depict mechanical directions." 

Further to its design, another intriguing quirk of Kentucky Route Zero's open road is its sense of permanence. Optional locations litter the map's roadside which, once visited, grant players access to additional story vignettes that often bolster elements of the main plotline. What's interesting, though, is that once these locations have been inspected they vanish from the map. Much similar to how the game's dialogue system functions, the conversations had in these areas are spent and therefore inaccessible thereafter. 

"It's a kind of realism that makes the people feel a bit more real—that you can't just go and treat them like an information vending machine or something like that," says Elliot of the process. This in turn prevents players from interrogating NPCs and repeating themselves—a mechanic which has plagued narrative-driven games for decades. 

Kentucky Route Zero is good at elegant, restrained storytelling. In an interview with Rock, Paper, Shotgun last year, Elliott praised From Software's Dark Souls for being "economical with the way it uses lore", which is something I'm compelled to acknowledge as I feel there are some strangely appropriate, albeit wholly incongruous, parallels to be drawn between KRZ and Lordran. Elliot laughs at the general comparison, but does recognise the abstract likeness as far as each game's wider world and the player's insignificance within it is concerned.    

"Lordran and the settings for the other Dark Souls games have a lot of history there but you really have to dig for it. When you play it, you're just dropped in and asked to understand and accept and just respond to the way all of these creatures are behaving and how these environments work etc.," says Elliott. "The characters that actually will talk to you talk to you often with this sense of pity, they know what's going on but they know you're new to this. In KRZ also we don't ask the player to bone up on a bunch of lore before we start talking to them—we just start talking to them as though they're already an inhabitant of the world. 

"That's something we get from magical realist fiction where one of the technical tenets of that genre is that people accept the magical and the bizarre along with the real."

Of course visually, these games couldn't be more at odds with one another and although KRZ suits its universally dull and muted colour palette, The Zero itself is almost mesmerizing in its use of laborious two-tone that distances itself from even the darkest of the game's narrative scenes.  

"The map mode is loosely inspired by early computer graphics that had all sorts of limitations and where it was pretty common to just have simple line art. One example is Mystery House but even earlier video art stuff like the Rutt/Etra system which is a video synthesiser that works with scan lines and has a certain look to it, like a rippling wave-form. Specifically The Zero has ripples and this sort of ribbed appearance reminiscent of the uniform appearance of scan lines." 

"I think in some other games when they show a map they have a scale morphism or metaphor, maybe like a highway or something," Elliott adds. "I think in Sam and Max Hit the Road, they have a touristy cheesy highway map—there's other metaphors for what a map is—and I think ours is a weird non-time specific early computer influence. We're topological too because it's kind of like a graphic map that has topological too. The aesthetic has a pretty fair connection to that sort of stuff."  

Likewise, KRZ's sound has a similarly strong connection to the The Zero—such as the humming engine of Conway's truck which pitches up and down depending on the speed you're travelling. In Act 2 alone the map has six different loops which switch whenever the player turns at certain symbols, alternating to different 'tracks' as it were in the process. It may sound straightforward, but this process is so computationally intensive that it's actually broken some players' computers. 

"Since the Zero is a dark, subterranean cave highway, we thought it should have an ever-changing sense of space," says KRZ's sound designer Ben Babbitt. "So as the walls of the cave expand and contract around you, some properties of a dynamic reverb effect are modulated by the tunnel diameter immediately around the truck. So some parts of the cave have the sense of being more muddy, resonant or close, etc., by the way the reverb affects the music and engine sound in different spots.

"Real-time modulation of the reverb effect worked pretty well on all the computers we tested the game with at the time, but after we published Act II we discovered that it was too resource-intensive for some players' computers—it makes a weird, distorted crackling sound. That bothered some people, so for them we added an option to disable the reverb effect along the Zero. But we didn't want players to disable the effect unless they were really bothered by the crackling, so we gave it the unappealing label 'disable artisanal audio' in the menu."

Act 4's transition from The Zero into the river-set Echo, while seemingly jarring in game terms—suddenly the player is ostensibly a passenger and observer of the game's ever-growing cast—was an organic process behind the scenes. The decision to move the action onto the water was made early on in KRZ's development and recaptured the aforementioned jigsaw puzzle layout that was originally designed for The Zero. Filled with people living peaceful and sedentary lives along its riverbanks, The Echo feels less sinister against its land-bound counterpart—which is a direct result of Elliot and Kemenczy's desire to portray something a little warmer and more human.  

As such, Act 4 is almost certainly the calm before the fifth and final act's storm where I suspect we'll spend much of our time travelling The Zero once more. Both Elliot and Kemenczy remain tight-lipped—"We got a good outline going, an interlude and right now we're doing a lot of housekeeping, getting our codebase up to date on Unity 5," says Kemenczy—however where Kentucky Route Zero's largely maladjusted characters falter within its delicate and malleable world, The Zero remains a rare constant.