I love driving. I love the physical act of it — controlling this big, sophisticated machine like it’s an extension of me. But I also love the poetry and adventure of long-distance drives — the freedom, the self-reliance, the gradually changing landscape, the sense of limitless possibilities.
Video games are fantastic at capturing the first of these things, in Gran Turismo and countless other racing games. Sometimes, they try to do both things at once. Open-world driving games like Forza Horizon deliver a compressed and heightened dose of the pleasures of the road trip, while the Truck Simulator series offers a more workaday, realistic take on it — and Desert Bus infamously parodied the boredom inherent in the idea of simulating long drives.
Keep Driving, an in-development indie game by Sweden’s YCJY Games (Sea Salt, Post Void), takes a different approach, aiming to capture both the romance and the tedium of long drives while jettisoning the part where you actually control the vehicle. Instead, it borrows from another video game genre that is all about voyage, adventure, and progress: old-school role-playing games that are all about the hero’s journey.
In the game’s demo, which is available now, the aim is to drive across an unnamed, fictional country that looks vaguely like the America of a thousand road-rip movies to your friend’s house for a night of playing video games. The drive will take four days in-game, and somewhere between one and two hours in real life. After packing your trunk (a Resident Evil-style grid inventory), you choose your next stop from a map and hit the road. Then you sit back and watch your car eat up the miles as the world scrolls by from right to left.
On each leg of the journey, events crop up that threaten to impede your progress: a slow tractor, potholes, or rain puddles, for example. These threaten to eat away at your three resources: gas, the durability of your car, and your energy as a driver. There’s an abstract turn-based event system where you use skills and items from the glovebox to eliminate threats (perhaps owing something to Oregon Trail) that appear at the bottom of a screen as a row of color-coded icons. Skills like “relax” and items like duct tape target particular patterns of icons, so there’s a light puzzle-game element to these events.
Environmental conditions affect these events, too, applying buffs and debuffs. Rain increases gas drain, while a beautiful forest inspires you, removing the energy cost of some skills. And you can also pick up hitchhikers, who come with additional skills but bring their own idiosyncrasies — a wandering songwriter gets offended if you don’t use his skills; a cool young woman fills your trunk with useless trash. At rest stops, you can refuel, shop for items that replenish resources or counter debuffs, or sacrifice time to take a job and earn some much-needed gas money.
Keep Driving is deeply nostalgic. It’s set in the early 2000s, you’re just past your teen years, and you’ve bought your first car — perhaps a dilapidated 1970s muscle car or a boxy 1980s saloon that looks like a 200 Series Volvo. The car has a CD player spinning garage-band indie rock and you can fill the trunk with bottles of Coke, guitars, and crates of beer. Skills are represented by blurry Polaroids held by bulldog clips. Occasionally, moments of introspection will come upon you as you drive: My back hurts, I should call my parents, what am I doing with my life? Multiple-choice answers to these questions apply status effects — some bad, some good.
It’s a very specific, strong atmosphere that summons that rootless time in life when driving for three days just to play video games with a friend seems not just feasible but a good use of time. It reminds me of when, just after my 21st birthday, I set out in my little red Fiat to tour some far-flung friends’ houses one hazy, aimless summer. The pixel-art cars, moody landscapes, and boho hitchhikers are well observed, channeling the feel of a hip, late-’90s coming-of-age movie.
In the moment, the abstract game mechanics are a little hard to get your head around. Applying patience (a skill) and chewing gum (an item) to navigate a tricky road surface is a bigger mental leap than using spells and swords to defeat a monster, at least for me. But over a couple of hours, Keep Driving perfectly evokes the precarious freedom of a long drive when you have no money and all the time in the world. It’s a game about guzzling coffee to sustain all-night drives, sleeping in the back seat, and holding yourself and your car together with pizza and duct tape. Over the 15-20 hours the developers promise for the finished article, Keep Driving could end up the perfect video game road trip.
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