Keep Driving review

I grew up in a town with nearly no public transportation, so for most of my childhood I walked, skateboarded, and biked to get around, but freedom—true freedom—was only gained as a teenager when I got my first car. It was a hand-me-down from my grandfather, so it wasn't sporty or cool, but it was the only real escape from the drudgery of school, the oppression (real or imagined) of parents, and the growing panic that adulthood, which meant a job, the military, or more damn school, was waiting at the end of the summer.

Keep Driving is a turn-based road trip RPG that perfectly captures the freedom and possibilities of being young and having a beat-up old car, just enough money to fill it with gas and snacks, and only the vaguest of destinations in mind. Just like in real life, road trips in Keep Driving feel like a carefree summertime journey where you blast some tunes, eat junk food, and watch your troubles shrink in the rearview mirror—until that check engine light starts blinking, your tank is almost empty, and you realize there's something a bit odd about that hitchhiker you picked up.

Map quest

The game begins with the perfect excuse for a road trip: an old friend who lives all the way across the map has invited you to a music festival. With three months of summer stretching out before you, grab a few supplies from your house, open the map to pick a route, and start driving. Your car is your inventory: store useful stuff in the glove box, extra supplies in the trunk, and eventually people (and maybe the occasional dog) in the empty seats.

As you travel between any two map locations in Keep Driving, you encounter a handful of obstacles, called road events, that slow you down: mud puddles and potholes, traffic jams and biker gangs, and situations every driver has encountered at some point like "vague lanes" or a bug that flew in the window and can't find its way out. These road events are Keep Driving's version of turn-based combat, as each turn threatens to damage four different attributes: gasoline, cash, the car's durability, and your energy levels. To dispel them, you need to match the threats with pips on your skill cards or items in your glove box.

It's a simple combat system that's easy to grasp within a few tries, and while it never really gets any more complex, it requires a lot of preparation to survive. Most skill cards have only a few uses before they need to be replenished by sleeping in a town, and glove box items (like duct tape, which protects durability, and cigarettes, which prevents loss of energy) have limited uses before you'll need to buy more at gas stations and convenience stores.

If an event depletes you enough, by emptying your gas or totaling your engine, it doesn't mean the end of your run. You can call a tow truck (if you have the cash) to take you to the previous town, or spend energy walking to the closest gas station, or in the most dire of circumstances, do the unthinkable: call your parents and tell them you need help. I had to do it in one of my runs, and it brought back the shame of doing it (way more than once) in real life. Thankfully, Keep Driving spares you the actual lecture from Dad.

Need a lift?

And then there are the hitchhikers. As you cross the map you'll encounter solo travelers making their own way through the world: a punk rocker with a dog (who takes up an extra seat), a young woman in a wedding dress who left her groom at the altar, a burnout who lost his job and is estranged from his wife, a mechanic who will smoke all your cigarettes. None of them have names, just labels you might use to describe a stranger: The Kid, The Songwriter, The Punk. I assume they think of me as "The Driver."

At first hitchhikers feel like they're just a tool to employ in your road events, since each brings a unique skill card to the dashboard, but as you travel together they each slowly reveal more about themselves and their journeys through quick bits of text conversation. Drive with them long enough and they'll unlock new skills, and eventually reveal their own quest you can choose to pursue. The Punk wants to go to a club in a distant town, so can you drop him off there? The Bride wants to let loose and have some fun: got any weed? More importantly, as they start to feel like friends, or at least the kinds of temporary friends you made out of necessity when you were young and exploring the world.

Developer YCJY Games does an impressive job of developing characters who are, technically, just pixelated square portraits you lock into inventory slots. With minimal text, their stories and personalities come through, and by the end of the trip it's clear that we're all crammed into this car for the same reason: because we're all a little damaged, a little aimless, a little adrift.

I was genuinely sad to see some of my passengers climb out of the car once I'd completed their quests, and not just because it meant losing the extra skills I'd been relying on. (Except for one of them: I was happy to be rid of a kid I'd picked up because they kept having to stop to use the bathroom.)

These characters also introduce you to crime, of which there is an amusing amount in Keep Driving. I even picked up a guy in an orange prison jumpsuit who didn't really convince me he was innocent. Even him I wound up liking, though he's a pain to manage (no one will sit next to him) and his initial skill is one you have to pay $10 a pop for. Weirdly, it wasn't even him who was the biggest troublemaker: a hippie named "The Hurricane" kept wanting me to get high, had a skill that could only be used if I was driving while drunk, constantly filled my inventory slots with trash, and whose third level ability would let me shoplift from stores.

In a game where you can be pulled over by the cops and arrested, driving with a gun and a baggie of coke with an escaped convict in the passenger seat definitely turns a chill road trip into a white-knuckle affair.

As required for any memorable road trip, Keep Driving has an utterly kickass soundtrack. I'm not going to pretend I'm cool enough to have heard of Swedish indie bands like Westkust, Makthaverskan, Zimmer Grandioso, and Fucking Werewolf Asso, but they've got a new fan and their tracks will be part of my next real roadtrip. Even one of my hitchhikers, a musician whose guitar took up an annoying amount of room in my trunk for one of my trips, presented me with a CD of some of his songs when we finally parted ways.

There are more than a half-dozen endings in Keep Driving besides just getting to that concert and hanging with your buddy. (Yes, you can get arrested.) I've found several of them and I'll keep playing until I've collected them all, and then I'm going to play some more.

Keep Driving is the sort of game I should love on the Steam Deck, but unfortunately, some of the interactions like dragging items around are pretty fiddly and the smaller pixel art icons are hard to read on a smaller screen. Otherwise it'd be perfect for sinking back into the couch, getting high or drunk (or not, your choice, say no to peer pressure), letting the road take you where it will, and making some temporary friends you'll never forget.