While most driving games take the obvious route and simulate what it’s like to control a vehicle, YCJY Games’ Keep Driving instead simulates everything that happens outside of that. We won’t even compare it with the likes of Le Mans Ultimate for a second, or even with The Crew Motorfest, but at the same time, you’ve simply got to respect a game that lets you decide what to put in your glovebox.
Available on Steam now, the guts of Keep Driving are bits of roguelikes, adventure games, and RPGs. You’re plunged into an engaging pixel art depiction of 2000s America, and asked to pick a backstory for your young character. This includes what their summer job is and how well they get on with their parents. After all of that, you get to let loose in a boxy sedan with no particular objective other than maybe—if you feel like it—making it over to a festival a few hundred miles away.
It does a great job of capturing the slightly terrifying freedom of being a young adult with a car and very little experience of looking after oneself. You could go anywhere. The backbreaking weight of life’s accumulating responsibilities has yet to find its way onto your shoulders. Time feels infinite, but there’s also the lingering sense that it’s precious, and that older people view you with envy. How should you spend it?
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Thankfully, Keep Driving doesn’t require you to have the answers or any particular plan for that matter. Things have a way of happening to you once you hit the road, from hitchhikers who exchange their mix CDs and snacks for safe passage to boss fight events against herds of sheep and tractors.
The precise mechanics of those confrontations vary from stage to stage. They involve matching icons on your dashboard to those on your skills, which hang down from your rearview mirror like air fresheners—and if that sounds a bit abstract, that’s only because it absolutely is. Some of the inherent satisfaction of finally working your way past a wilfully slow-moving vehicle is lost in the fight system, but seeing these encounters depicted as boss battles in the first place is inspired stuff.
There are a variety of vehicles you can embark on Keep Driving’s freeform adventure with, although all but one of them are locked the first time you play. Put the hours in, though, and you can start a new adventure with a lumbering pickup truck, the kind whose suspension forks take a full two seconds to bottom out, and an unnamed and only slightly beaten-up muscle car. It may not be the most dependable choice for a cross-country, heavy mileage road trip, but that’s the nice thing about being a young kid on a summer adventure: You’ve got the license to make those mistakes.
You’ve also got numerous ways out of a sticky situation, like a breakdown. If you decided that some experience working as a mechanic was in your backstory, you can roll your sleeves up and fix it yourself. If you’ve got a good relationship with your parents, they’ll come and pick you up. Or maybe your hitchhiker friend happens to know their way around an engine bay.
The game pays attention to all the decisions you make along the journey, even the ones you don’t realize you’re making, and then resurfaces them down the road in the next scenario. That makes every journey feel like it’s been written by you, and it makes Keep Driving feel immersive and full of agency and anecdotes, in a way that’s extremely rare in a driving game.
And if that doesn’t sell you: You select songs by manually operating a CD player. We were handed a disc by a stranger in a camper van outside a gas station, slid it into the player, and let the early noughties jangly emo music ring out. How’s that for immersive?
NOTE: This story first appeared on TopGear.com. Minor edits have been made.
