Early 2000s, 1980s cars, music festivals. If I didn’t know better I would’ve guessed the developers of Keep Driving had rifled through my Facebook post history and decided to make a game to directly aimed at my nostalgia. A lot of my early 20s was spent in the driver’s seat of my 1980s Honda Prelude, ferrying more people than was sensible to various concerts, music festivals and other young-adult activities dotted around Australia’s east coast. It was a great time of bonding, discovering who you were (sometimes, more importantly who you weren’t) and overcoming the mundane challenges of adulthood to be able to do the thing. Keep Driving captures the essence of this experience perfectly, blending together all it’s various parts into a cohesive experience that seems daunting at first but quickly blooms into an engaging battle of wits between you and the road.
It’s sometime in the early 2000s and you’ve just gotten your first car. Maybe you’re a poor student, just making their first steps away from home or perhaps you’re just starting out your career as a mechanic. The path you’ve walked only marks the beginning of your journey though, what awaits you on the other side of the country is the tantalising possibility of a week of fun, sweat and music with your friends. How you get there though is up to you and the journey is likely to be anything but straightforward. Will your hunk of junk make it all the way there? Or are you going to find yourself stranded on the side of the road, cashless and without a hope, waiting to be saved by some passing stranger?
Keep Driving’s pixel art graphics are superb, sticking to the age old credence of not simply taking higher resolution images and dropping the resolution but using each pixel to its fullest to convey as much information as possible. This, combined with the fluid animations and backgrounds, gives Keep Driving a stylized gritty realism feeling. You can see that a lot of attention has been paid to the small details, things like the hip swing of a hula girl dashboard ornament or the visceral tearing opening of an envelope. These things didn’t need that much attention but they got them anyway. Topping that all off is very early 2000s feeling soundtrack which you should make a point of controlling properly. There’s some great tracks buried in there.
Keep Driving’s core is a resource management sim, pitting you and your fellow travelers against the hazards of being on the road. You have your car which, depending on your choices, will have a certain number of seats and boot space. Those seats can be taken up with hitchhikers who’ll bring both abilities and drawbacks, the latter coming as they level up as you successfully navigate a section of road. The inventory can be packed out with things to help your journey, items needed for quests and other things that you might find in your travels. Each stretch of road you travel will have hazards along the way ranging from simple things like potholes, more complex challenges like tailgating drivers to the downright oddities like a rainbow which you must pass in order to reach your destination. All of these things will drain your various resources, items and skills which you’ll need to replenish from time to time. On first blush it can be a little daunting but it doesn’t take long to get a handle on the core mechanics, freeing you up to explore the map (almost) as freely as you choose.
Each of the hazards on a road takes the form of a turn based battle with a number of hazards that you have to neutralize. Those hazards can also have statuses as well which can indicate things like whether or not they’ll damage this turn, clone themselves and so on. You can use your and the abilities of your fellow riders to eliminate them which will come with their own set of costs. If you want to you can also nope out of any situation by flooring it which will make each of the hazards damage you but can sometimes be the only resolution you have left. As you can’t change skills mid-flight you need to plan ahead to be able to mitigate any hazard you might come across which, when you’re starting out, can be a bit troublesome.
It didn’t take me long to figure out that you can mitigate a lot of the main challenges through the use of relatively cheap items (WD40 and Chewing Gum were my favourites) and some choice vehicle upgrades. You won’t be able to grab all of these quickly on your first run but you can keep whatever you get between runs though, making future runs a lot easier. Indeed my second run I was so well equipped I was able to get the mountain ending without major incident, only needing a single jerry can and even then, that was just a safety net as I was running low on ability uses. Personally if you’re struggling I’d recommend seeking out the beaded seat covers and gas station flags, both of which made the core loop of the game significantly easier overall.
Given it’s procedural, open world nature Keep’s Driving narrative is going to be what you make of it. To be sure there’s some smaller vignettes scattered about and some interesting worldbuilding done through the use of hitchhiker conversations but apart from that there isn’t much else to hang your hat on. To be sure the stories of how you made a particular run or build are going to make for interesting discussion with others but beyond that it’s pretty much just surface level stuff to fill the voids the game’s longer passages where not much happens. Given the strength of the core game loop though I don’t count this too heavily against it.
Keep Driving took me back to the days of misspent youth, of the challenges in simply moving yourself from point A to B when you don’t have anyone else to rely on. Whilst my choice of car, music and venues might’ve differed the core experience didn’t; I felt right back at home in the driver’s seat once again thinking about times gone by. For that alone Keep Driving is worth a look in but it’s the deep strategy mechanics that will keep you coming back, beckoning you to explore the world more and to conquer the challenges the road puts before you.
Rating: 8.5/10
Keep Driving is available on PC right now for $26.50. Total play time was 4.2 hours with 11% of the achievements unlocked.
