Why Kentucky Route Zero's creators have been so quiet

The third and fourth act for Kentucky Route Zero have not been abandoned despite no progress reports or release date announcements being made by its developer, according to Cardboard Computer founders Jake Elliott and Tamas Kemenczy.

The statement from the studio addresses the low profile taken between releases of each of the five acts. According to the update, this is the result of a "barrage of negative attention" after the team missed its previously announced deadlines for the game's first two acts.

"It was pretty demoralizing to miss deadlines," reads the statement, "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."

This includes the development of "The Entertainment," an interlude between acts two and three. According to its developers, this will prove as important a component as any of the full acts; likewise, the third act will be "significantly" more involved than the first two.

Kentucky Route Zero's second act released last summer on Windows PC, Mac and Linux. The release was previously slated for launch at the end of April, but was delayed to May. According to Cardboard Computer at the time, the delay was due to unexpected work with distribution, the Independent Games Festival and troubleshooting for "a larger number of players than we anticipated."

A season pass, which will include all five episodes as they launch, is available for $24.99.