It’s rare to see a game as committed to its core concept as Keep Driving is. On the surface, it might look like a management sim, a survival game, or a more narrative-focused experience with key decisions to branch the storyline. And Keep Driving is all of these things, but to reduce it to any single one of them would be to way undersell this game’s sheer devotion to being what I will shamelessly call a Car-PG.
This is a game that so wants to sell you on the experience of a cross-country road trip that it doesn’t spare a single detail. From its licensed soundtrack taking the form of an in-game CD you have to burn with whatever tracks you want to hear before inserting them into the player, to its meticulous decision-tracking systems that hand you run-altering traits based on choices you didn’t even realize you were making, to its bizarre turn-based battle system where your enemies aren’t violent thugs, but things like an unexpected traffic jam or sheep that are blocking the road, Keep Driving is virtually everything I wanted to see from its basic premise, but designed and extrapolated to a degree I didn’t imagine was possible.
And though its check engine light came on a few times while playing, so to speak, what’s here is bound to become a modern classic. Maybe after a few patches, though. Let’s get into it.
Keep Driving wastes no time taking typical RPG conventions and twisting them to neatly fit its life-on-the-open-road vibe. The most crucial choices you’ll make when starting a new game are deciding what your occupation is, what you’re bringing on the road with you, and the strength of your relationship with your parents. That last one might seem especially odd, but what’s very clever is that this is Keep Driving’s take on a difficulty slider. Rate your relationship with your parents on a 1 to 5 scale with 1 being very bad and 5 being very good, and the higher you rate it, the more likely your parents will bail you out of trouble if you run out of gas in the middle of the highway or accidentally total your car. Given that Keep Driving is presented in a roguelike format, where lengthy narrative and choice-driven runs have randomly generated events each time you start over, getting your ass handed to you in a battle or not being able to afford gas could be a run-ending nightmare if nobody is there to bail you out.
The other choices are important too, though. Your occupation could simply be unemployed, which starts you with the “Carefree” trait that restores extra energy as you travel farther into the unknown, or a student that starts with one skill point and gains another each time you read. And what you’re bringing with you could be a care package from your mom or just some useful tools for the road. The options here aren’t exactly abundant, but they’re certainly interesting.
Once you begin your journey, you’ll be introduced to your 4 key resources of energy, money, car durability and gas, which together act as your health bar during road events. But before encountering any of those, you have to decide where you’re going. You’re given a starting objective of meeting a friend at a festival on the other side of the country, but what you do in between and whether you do that at all is pretty much up to you.
The world map offers branching possibilities that will have to be carefully considered depending on what’s at each destination. Maybe you’ll head to a town that has an employment office so you can earn some money. Or maybe you don’t want to work at all and would rather pick up random hitchhikers and get drunk and high behind the wheel – the game doesn’t stop you and arguably kind of encourages you to be a jackass if that’s what you want. But once you settle on a path, you begin the journey of actually getting there, which will be a long stretch of road filled with beautiful randomly generated pixel art scenery, and emerging events that will force you to duke it out in battle. A battle can be anything from navigating vague lanes to unexpected traffic jams to dealing with an aggressive tailgater. These “enemies” will target one or more of your four key resources, and you’ll need to defend yourself with your own skill cards or those of any one of your hitchhikers.
You start with a fairly meager selection of skill cards, but the more skill points you gain and more hitchhikers you pick up, the more options you ultimately get for battle. Fighting involves matching the pattern on your skill cards with the pattern of your enemy’s attacks as closely as possible to efficiently remove the most dangerous threats before they drain your resources. Perfectly aligning your skill card’s resources with those of your attacker will grant you a perfect hit and allow you to take an extra turn, making careful strategizing about which skill card to use and when a necessity for successful battles. And while the game’s events repeat quite frequently, there’s something inherently satisfying about the battle system that never made it feel like it was getting old. Having the right combination of skills to finish a battle event before anything managed to even attack you is super satisfying, and having so much to do between major destinations gives the game that epic road trip feel that it’s clearly aiming for.
There’s something kind of subversive about the whole thing too, because like I said, the game carefully monitors all of your actions and might throw a wrench in if your plans are too carefully laid. For example, I had an attack that I relied on frequently because it could remove all kinds of threats and always give me an extra turn. Well, the game noticed I was relying on this attack and gave me a new trait that made it limited-use – I could now use it only 5 times before I needed to rest and recover it. I’m not sure I’ve experienced an RPG balance itself in this way before, but consider me impressed.
Battles are a large part of what you’ll do while traveling from one key point of interest to another, but not the only thing. Sometimes introspective thought bubbles will come up that make you question what you’re doing and why, and your answers to these will feed the game enough information to assign you traits and objectives. For example, if the focus of your road trip seems to be working whenever you can to survive, and you answer the introspective questions about work saying you actually don’t mind it that much, you’ll get assigned a task that just says to go home and find a stable job. And that’s a totally valid thing to do! It’s an example of the bountiful freedom that Keep Driving makes a foundational tenet of its design – do what you want, just keep your gas tank full, your car running, your energy reasonably managed, and don’t lose all of your money. Accordingly, there are multiple endings to discover depending on what direction you take your runs in.
While I’ve probably given you the basic gist of how Keep Driving is played and what it’s about by now, I don’t think I’ve yet conveyed just how intricate the design of this game is. Every one of its numerous systems makes complete sense in the context of its broader ideas, but I was constantly impressed that the developers even went there. If you sleep in your car too much, you’ll get status effects like “Cold” and “Dirty,” the latter of which will make hitchhikers gain experience more slowly because presumably you smell too bad.
Whereas the “Cold” status effect can be avoided if you install a heating system in the car. You can also buy a coffee at a local gas station when you’re low on energy and remove the “Tired” status effect. But you better drink it quickly, because if you let it get cold, you’ll be too grossed out by it and just need to throw it out instead. At one point, I chose to not really worry about that and buy candy bars and soda to increase my energy. The result was a trait called Sugar Addict, where each sugary treat would net me one extra energy point but also make me tired. But one of the wildest examples of the game’s systems actively manipulating me was when one of my hitchhiking passengers, who went by the nickname “The Hurricane,” gave me a new task of driving drunk.
So, I drank some beer, got my buzz on, and hit the open road like a complete piece of shit. There were consequences though, albeit not ones as severe as you might hope. When you’re drunk, the screen gently rocks back and forth in a way that’s surprisingly disorienting, and battles become time-limited, making you have to react much more quickly to road events. I made it to my next destination intact, but my reward was the “Headache” status effect that would make me receive double damage during battle if I didn’t purchase some aspirin from the local market. It also got me the “Sad” status effect that would remove my ability to perform extra turns after achieving perfect hits in battle. And I could let that wear off over time, or I could have another beer immediately, which would make me happy again! And drunk again. That’s right, Keep Driving even has systems to simulate some degree of alcoholism.
While I credit Keep Driving for having an extensive series of back-end systems to track your behavior without restricting it, I do feel that some might find its handling of sensitive topics to be a bit clumsy. The incentive to drive drunk is one thing and probably a good enough reason on its own not to gift this game to anybody too young and impressionable, but there was also a strange task I got where I received a letter saying my grandmother is dying of stage 4 cancer and I need to go visit her before she passes. So, I do, and it’s just the player character’s grandmother standing outside of the hospital essentially saying, “The doctors said my cancer has spread and my lungs are filling with fluid. Anyway, let’s talk about your inheritance!” I am paraphrasing for the sake of brevity, so it wasn’t quite that egregious, but it was game-ified enough that it’s bound to make particular players feel a certain way if they’ve recently lost a loved one. In my opinion, that doesn’t strike the right tone.
Each run of Keep Driving is likely to only take you a few hours, but you’ll unlock things like new cars and types of skill trees as you go. Again, the level of freedom is pretty astonishing, so even with each complete road trip being relatively short, there is a massive amount of replayability here. Unfortunately, it hurts me to say this, but there is also a major problem with bugs, and it’s a problem that I find very difficult to accurately report here because the developers were clearly hard at work pushing patches throughout the entire review period. Some of the worst bugs I encountered aren’t even worth mentioning anymore because they were patched while I was playing the game. And yet, I still had anything from minor issues like talking to characters that weren’t actually there, to annoying issues like the sound cutting out requiring me to reload the game, to extremely major game-breaking issues like the game crashing at the same spot in my run every single time and requiring me to lose about three hours of progress to start the run over from the beginning.
Now, for all I know, maybe that bug has already been addressed since I didn’t see it come up in subsequent runs, but I really have no way to figure that out given the variability of each playthrough. All I can speculate is given the number of such bugs I encountered during my review period, this game probably should have been delayed a few weeks, and it might be worth waiting a little bit if you want to get the most polished technical experience.
Somehow, I’ve blathered on this long without once talking in detail about Keep Driving’s presentation, which is actually one of my favorite parts of it. Even as someone who’s not especially in love with pixel art, I have to admit this game looks incredible all while keeping a fairly grungy vibe. The procedurally generated scenery that passes you as you drive is a joy to behold and has so many different types of multi-layered landscapes, from mountains to forests to wide open fields and densely packed cities. It plays great on the Steam Deck too, even though it doesn’t currently support controllers, a feature that’s promised to be coming according to an in-game menu. But even so, on the Steam Deck it’s very playable with just the right trackpad and left and right triggers to emulate a mouse. Overall, it’s a great-looking game, and it’s backed by a fantastic licensed soundtrack created by a variety of Swedish indie bands whose CDs you can collect throughout your journey.
As I mentioned before, the game also requires you to stop and burn CDs of which tracks you want to play, up to 6 per disc to start, but that maximum can grow as you gain the right traits. If you don’t want to bother with this, you can always just hit the shuffle button and it will burn you a randomly generated CD of the game’s tracks, but I love this system for presenting a soundtrack because it adds so much immersion. But the music itself is also great – even though some of the bands weren’t really my vibe, they didn’t have to be because I could always listen to the other ones. I’m not certain how much licensed indie music Keep Driving has in total, but rest assured, by indie game standards, it’s a lot.
The phrase “it’s a lot” kind of applies to the whole experience here, though. Keep Driving is a true roguelike RPG with so much more freedom and depth than most players are likely to expect from it. It’s a game that kept subverting my expectations over and over while being completely true to exactly the type of experience it wants to be. And if it weren’t for the fact that it just doesn’t feel completely ready to release, I’d be tempted to call it one of the biggest early surprises of 2025 and potentially one of the best games of the year. I can’t call it that quite yet, but with some time, I hope its biggest issues can be patched out and leave the game’s fascinating design to speak for itself.
GREAT
Comments