If you love RPGs, you’re probably drowning in them right now. Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2, Avowed, and Monster Hunter Wilds are all sizable commitments that dropped within weeks of one another. You likely don’t have too much time to juggle those three games, let alone anything else, but there’s one more RPG you should add to your list: Keep Driving.
Released earlier this month before a flood of big budget games took center stage, Keep Driving is an “atmospheric management RPG” available now on PC. It casts players as a budding adult who sets out on a cross-country road trip. The goal is to make it to a music festival within a month of traveling. It’s a pixel art adventure that both aims to capture the freedom of the open road and the challenges that come with living a wanderer’s life. If you love creative games that twist genres around to invent something entirely new, Keep Driving is the one game released this February that you should make sure to play.
When my journey begins, I need to make some key decisions. What’s my job, if I even have one? What kind of car do I have? What’s my relationship with my parents? Those are all important questions, as they determine how much space I have in my ride to store items, what gear I’m bringing with me, and the likelihood that my parents will bail me out if I find myself in a tough spot. Once that’s established, I start automatically moving along a 2D road while my CD player spits out some grungy garage rock. I eventually hit a town where I can fuel up, buy snacks, customize my car, and more. When I’m ready to leave, I pick another route from my map and keep on driving to the next town.
It sounds easy enough, but Keep Driving is a surprisingly dense, systems-heavy RPG packed into a bite-sized indie that can be cleared in a few hours. First, I need to learn how to manage my car. I need to keep an eye on its durability and gas level at all times. Of course, that costs money, a scarce resource that I must learn how to earn as a wanderer. I can get some cash from odd jobs in cities, though those will both eat up my time and my energy, another resource that can leave me stranded on the highway once depleted. I can also get money by picking up loose delivery jobs, though those may require me to go out of my way to deliver beer or find a lost cat. That’ll require time, which is technically another resource since I only have so many days to make it out east (and I’ll need to spend some of that time sleeping to refresh my energy).
It took me a few in-game days to really get the loop down, but Keep Driving hooked me as a clever car management sim once I grasped it. It’s not too far off from Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector, which required me to manage my stress, money, and fuel while bouncing between space towns. The difference is that my resources are bags of Doritos and cigarettes. Its vast array of items come with a lot of nuances I need to learn. I can chug a soda if I want to get some energy back quickly, but that’ll leave me with a “tired” status effect in the long run. It’s a series of delicate balancing acts as I try to keep my eyes open and my engine running.
There are plenty of obstacles sitting between me and freedom. During the driving phase, I come up against a series of random events. Everything from a traffic jam to a car tailing me too close is represented as a turn-based RPG battle. On each turn, I need to counter “attacks” by resolving them with learned skills and items in my glove box. If a gas icon appears on screen, I’ll lose some fuel on my opponent’s turn unless I can play a skill with a gas icon on it. It’s more complicated than simply matching images, as certain skills might cost me a tick of energy or a little cash. I can learn new skills along the way, but I can also pick up hitchhikers who give me access to more (as well as some negative passive effects).
That barely explains the full scope of Keep Driving’s systems, but it all becomes second nature after a few drives. What’s more immediate is the emergent storytelling that arises during each run as all these systems overlap. My favorite story came when I found a six-year-old hitchhiker alone in a town. She asked for a lift home and I agreed to let her ride alongside me and some crust punks I had picked up. What I didn’t realize was that there was a catch to my good deed: she’d need to randomly stop every once and a while while on the road for a pee break. That would require a short battle each time that required me to resolve an energy attack. The easiest way to do that was by smoking a cigarette from my glovebox. I kept doing that, but I eventually gained an addiction for it. That burdened me with a new trait that meant I’d smoke two cigarettes instead of one every time I lit up. Frustrated by that and her constant talking in the car, I eventually abandoned her in a small town altogether. Not the nicest move, I know, but I was role-playing as a dirtbag, okay?
It’s moments like that which make Keep Driving special, even when its core traversal hook gets repetitive and drawn out by the end. It really feels like a unique road trip where anything can and will go wrong. An overly ambitious decision to drive up a mountain ended in a failure that forced me to call my folks for help. I became best friends with a hitchhiker’s dog (I let it ride in the passenger seat eventually), who got me through many tough spots with its bonus skills. I agreed to deliver some beer to a house party, but then wound up stealing it all and selling it for a quick buck. All of that happened in one ever-changing trip that rarely felt static.
A few games have tried to capture the spirit of travel in the past few years — from Pacific Drive to Heading Out — but Keep Driving understands that a road trip isn’t just about maintaining a car. It’s about tuning yourself up too. Every roadblock is a learning experience that can shape who you are or how you see the world. By the end of my first run, my character was loaded up with personality-defining perks all earned through my escapades. I felt like an entirely new person by the end, one forged from my experiences out on the road. Keep Driving will make you wish that you could quit your day job and just drive. And who says you can’t?
Keep Driving is available now on PC.
