Most games find beauty in the imaginary, whether it be vast alien planets or sprawling cyberpunk skylines.Keep Drivingfinds beauty in reality and it doesn’t get much more real than an early 2000s cross-country road trip. With your favorite CD playing on the stereo and the open road ahead of you, the closest you may get to a real life epic “adventure” is crossing the country in your beat-up car with only your wits and whatever’s in your trunk to get you to your destination. This road trip rogue-like not only captures the vibes of a good old-fashioned road trip, but also serves as a beautiful portrait of the human spirit, following our main character as they grapple with coming of age, entering the real world and finding their purpose.
Review: Phantom Brave: The Lost Hero
Phantom Brave: The Lost Hero manages to modernize the first game’s formula, but fails to make it accessible for new audiences.
At its core,Keep Drivingis an inventory management roguelike with random turn-based encounters, except instead of combat, players spend their turns trying to keep up with the hazards that pop up on the road. Between potholes, animals crossing the road, getting pulled over by cops or even getting chased down by biker gangs, these encounters will push your vehicle, gas tank, wallet and even your own personal energy to the brink if not handled correctly.
Keep Drivingfinds beauty in reality, and it doesn’t get much more real than an early 2000s cross-country road trip
The system for these encounters is simple, yet satisfying. Limited-use items from gas stations and other shops can be used to temporarily assist you in overcoming obstacles, but the main goal is to develop experience on the road to know how to take them on yourself. As you keep driving (heh), you’ll unlock more skills and traits that make life on the road easier, which can be equipped in sets of five and serve as your “build,” so to speak. The depth of actually crafting an effective build for the simple puzzle gameplay isn’t realized to its full extent, but it more than gets the job done, and its simplicity keeps your mind clear for keeping track of the various other tasks at hand.
The core gameplay is on the inventory management side: keeping track of your four base stats (energy, money, gas and durability), searching for efficient paths to your next destination, collecting and optimizing upgrades for your car, and maintaining the supplies you need to deal with whatever could come next. Buffs and debuffs appear in the form of emotions and symptoms, with every-day problems like headaches and tiredness causing mechanical hazards in your encounters, increasing the energy cost of skills or even affecting the durability of your car. The game has a huge variety in terms of encounters and events, but could definitely use a bit more content on the “items and equipment” end of the spectrum.
More Like “Keep Vibing”
The majority of the game (much like a road trip) is idle, waiting for the next thing to happen, but here the act of sitting in the driver’s seat on cruise control is a fun and captivating experience. For one, the soundtrack is spectacular. Beginning with a lone shoegaze alt-rock album in your inventory, you begin building on to your collection as you make your way through the game, unlocking songs by buying CDs, receiving them as rewards or earning them as gifts. You choose the tunes as you drive, designing your own playlists as you cruise down the road, learning to love new favorites from a variety of genres and underground artists. Every track is unique, but they all perfectly capture that sense of nostalgia of your first unsupervised road trip as an adult.
The vibes continue as you begin to pick up hitchhikers, each of whom comes with their own quirks and stories, as well as unique skills that can be used in encounters. Hitchhikers take up space in your car that could be used for storing items, so it’s up to you to determine if their presence is worth the sacrifice of space (and other negative attributes they may carry). As you drive along with them, they’ll begin gaining experience and unlocking new skills and story beats. A personal favorite of ours was the musician, who traveled with a cat and a large guitar case that took up even more space in the car, but had a fantastic ability to make situations easier to handle with music while also contributing meaningful and introspective discussions between encounters.
These discussions throughout your journey, whether it be with yourself, your companions or NPCs you meet on the road, provide an extra layer of depth to the game, turning it from a fun roguelike into a true piece of art (at times I recalled games likeDisco ElysiumandRoad 96while interpreting the thoughts and tale of my character). It’s a truly impressive feat to achieve a consistent level of thematic storytelling when your game consists of randomized events and locations, but still achieves at evoking strong emotional reactions from its audience. The player will spend time discussing the tragic backstories of the people you meet along the way, thinking about how long it has been since you saw your parents last, and even taking a last-minute detour to say goodbye to your elderly grandmother one last time. While there are choices involved in approaching these important moments, there isn’t any choice in terms of dialogue (which isn’t specifically an issue, but is a potential exciting feature for future updates or sequels).
Closing Comments:
Keep Drivingis a charming, captivating and moving roguelike unlike any we’ve ever seen before, weaving an introspective and meaningful slice-of-life narrative while without sacrificing gameplay and interactivity. There’s room to improve, sure, but that doesn’t mean that the final product falls short by any means (and we all know by now that roguelike titles like this are ripe for updates and content expansions). At the risk of being overly sappy, it’s a game that really does keep us wanting to keep driving.
Keep Driving
Set in the early 2000s, Keep Driving sees you as young adult receiving their first car, now ready to journey across the country to a concert with your favorite band. However, players will have to deal with several choices and obstacles along the way, making handy use of whatever they have in their glove compartment.
