A while back, the BBC did a series on the trains that travel across the hills of India. These were services built during British rule, engines still humming along thanks to sheer determination. The last episode visited Shimla, the summer capital of British India, including the Chapslee Estate. It had turned into a small hotel, where the now-deceased Kanwar Singh spoke fondly of its charms. He described his services not as a business selling accommodation or food, but selling an "ambience" of a previous age.

Kentucky Route Zero, a point-and-click adventure that was a decade in the making and that released its final episode in January this year, seems to provide a similar type of ambience, one not based explicitly in time. The story follows Conway, an antiques delivery driver making his final stop, searching for the mysterious eponymous highway in a world drenched with magical-realism.

You might have conjured up images of hillbillies and farming knowing the game is based in Kentucky. But this couldn't be further from the truth, with designer Jake Elliot, along with Tamas Kemenczy and musician Ben Babbitt, speaking of diverse literature, plays and films, such as the work of Andrei Tarkovsky, all of which provided sources of creative inspiration. "We have a story of somebody making a delivery," Elliot says during a group video call with me, Kemenczy and Babbitt, "But of course it's run through with the emotional realities of why they're doing it and what it means for them. That's how I'd experience it."

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Episodic adventure game Kentucky Route Zero will at long last launch for Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One on 28th January, under the guise of its complete TV Edition.

It's on this date the saga's fifth and final slice will also arrive for PC, where episodes have been dropping on Steam since 2013.

If you're new to it all, Kentucky Route Zero is a point-and-click adventure seeped in story, set in and around an underground highway beneath US soil which is quietly used by all manner of people. Each episode brings more of these characters to light.

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"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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