Kentucky Route Zero act three is "significantly more involved" than previous acts, has no firm release date

From the outside, the Cardboard Computer had appeared dormant. The developers of lovely episodic adventure Kentucky Route Zero have been quiet on the status of Act III, refusing to divulge the episode's release status. Now, in a recent progress update on its progress, the studio has explained their silence, noting any previously planned launch dates had always been missed. As a result, the team are following game development trick #32: if you never announce a release date, it can never be delayed.

"We publicly announced release dates for Act I and II, and in both cases those dates slipped, which is not at all unusual in videogames or other creative projects. But, all the same, it was pretty demoralizing to miss deadlines, and the barrage of negative attention that followed made it only more difficult to focus on work. More importantly, we've learned that our process is quite exploratory, experimental, and unpredictable anyway.

"It's crucial for our work that we reserve the right to throw things away, rework things as necessary, and allow the project to grow organically. Regularly, scenes that we imagined would be very simple and small-scale bloom into something much more complex as we work on them. In short, it's difficult (or impossible) to really know what you're working on until you're really working on it, and it's important to us that we err on the side of respecting the game rather than the timeline."

What's more, the team's intermission project, The Entertainment , also became bigger than anticipated. That release will tie into KRZ in ways that, they say, will become more clear with the release of Act III.

Perhaps the best news of the update is that Act III will be significantly more involved than the previous two. "We knew this coming into it," they say, "based on our narrative outline of the game. There are also components of it that grew in scale beyond our expectation, but we feel they're worth the time and effort."

Phil has been writing for PC Gamer for nearly a decade, starting out as a freelance writer covering everything from free games to MMOs. He eventually joined full-time as a news writer, before moving to the magazine to review immersive sims, RPGs and Hitman games. Now he leads PC Gamer's UK team, but still sometimes finds the time to write about his ongoing obsessions with Destiny 2, GTA Online and Apex Legends. When he's not levelling up battle passes, he's checking out the latest tactics game or dipping back into Guild Wars 2. He's largely responsible for the whole Tub Geralt thing, but still isn't sorry.