I like driving. I love the physical act of it: piloting this big, sophisticated machine as if it were an extension of me. But I also love the poetry and adventure of long-distance riding – the freedom, the self-reliance, the gradually changing landscape, the sense of limitless possibility.
Video games are great at capturing the first of these things, in Gran Turismo and countless other racing games. Sometimes they try to do both things at the same time. Open world racing games such as Forza Horizon delivering a condensed and heightened dose of the joys of a road trip, while the Truck Simulator series offers a more everyday, realistic take on it – and Desert bus infamously parodied the boredom inherent in the idea of simulating long drives.
Keep drivingan indie game in development by the Swedish YCJY Games (Sea salt, Message invalid), takes a different approach, aiming to capture both the romance and tedium of long drives, while jettisoning the part where you actually drive the car. Instead, it borrows from another video game genre that’s all about journey, adventure, and progression: old-fashioned role-playing games that are all about the hero’s journey.
In the game’s demo, that is available nowThe goal is to drive through an unnamed, fictional country that vaguely resembles the America of a thousand road-rip movies to your friend’s house for an evening of playing video games. The drive takes four days in the game and somewhere between one and two hours in real life. After packing your suitcase (a Resident Evil-style grid inventory), you choose your next stop on a map and hit the road. Then you sit back and watch your car eat up the miles as the world rolls by from right to left.
During each part of the journey, events occur that threaten to hinder your progress: a slow tractor, potholes or rain puddles, for example. These threaten to deplete your three resources: gasoline, the durability of your car and your energy as a driver. There’s an abstract turn-based event system where you use skills and glovebox items to eliminate threats (perhaps as a result of something Oregon trail) that appear at the bottom of the screen as a row of color-coded icons. Skills like ‘relax’ and items like duct tape target certain icon patterns, so there’s a slight puzzle game element to these events.
Environmental conditions also affect these events, applying buffs and debuffs. Rain increases gas drainage, while a beautiful forest inspires you and reduces the energy costs of some skills. And you can also pick up hitchhikers, who have extra skills but bring their own quirks – a wandering songwriter gets offended if you don’t use his skills; a cool young woman fills your trunk with useless trash. At rest stops you can refuel, buy items that replenish resources or counteract setbacks, or sacrifice time to take a job and earn some much-needed gas money.
Keep driving is deeply nostalgic. Set in the early 2000s, you’re just out of your teens and you’ve bought your first car – maybe a run-down muscle car from the 1970s or a boxy sedan from the 1980s that looks like a car. 200 series Volvo. The car has a CD player that plays indie rock from a garage band and you can fill the trunk with bottles of coke, guitars and crates of beer. Skills are represented by blurry polaroids held by bulldog clips. Occasionally you’ll encounter moments of introspection as you drive: my back hurts, I need to call my parents, what am I doing with my life? Multiple choice answers to these questions apply status effects – some bad, some good.
It’s a very specific, strong vibe that evokes that rootless time in life when driving for three days just to play video games with a friend seems not only feasible, but a good use of time. It reminds me of the time, just after my 21st birthday, when I set out in my little red Fiat to explore the homes of some distant friends during a hazy, aimless summer. The pixel art cars, moody landscapes and boho hitchhikers are well observed and channel the feeling of a hip, late ’90s coming-of-age film.
At this point, the abstract game mechanics are a bit difficult to understand. Applying patience (a skill) and gum (an object) to navigate a tricky road surface is a bigger mental leap than using spells and swords to slay a monster, at least for me. But in a few hours, Keep driving perfectly evokes the precarious freedom of a long drive when you have no money and all the time in the world. It’s a game about guzzling coffee to drive all night, sleeping in the backseat, and holding yourself and your car together with pizza and duct tape. During the 15-20 hours that the developers promise for the finished article, Keep driving could be the perfect video game road trip.