Shift Your Adventure into High Gear: ‘Keep Driving’ Revolutionizes Road Trips into Thrilling Turn-Based RPGs

I like driving. I love the feeling of being physically active when I’m driving—controlling this big, sophisticated machine like it’s an extension of my body. At the same time, I also enjoy the poetry and adventure of long drives—the freedom, self-reliance, ever-changing landscapes, and endless possibilities.

In Gran Turismo and countless other racing games, game industry developers are very good at capturing and recreating the former, the specific feeling of the driver. Of course, they occasionally try to do both. Open-world racing games like Forza Horizon condense and intensify the fun of road trips, while the Truck Simulator series offers a more everyday, realistic experience – with Desert Bus taking on a spoofy texture. Simulates the hard-to-escape boredom of long-distance driving.

Keep Driving, an indie game being produced by Sweden’s YCJY Games (developer of Sea Salt and Post Void), takes a different approach, hoping to capture the romance and boredom of long-distance driving while completely abandoning actual control of the vehicle. link. Instead, the game draws on another genre of video games with themes of travel, adventure, and leveling up: old-school role-playing game mechanics (RPG) with the theme of the hero’s journey.

In the demo version of the game now available, the player’s goal is to drive through an unnamed fictional country that looks a bit like the United States that has appeared in a thousand road movies before heading to a friend’s house to play a game. Game night. The driving trip in the game takes four days, but in real life it takes one to two hours. After packing your suitcase (a grid storage box similar to those in the Resident Evil series), you can choose your next stop from the map and hit the road. Players only need to sit back and stare at your car moving forward along the road, while the entire world continues to roll away from the vehicle from right to left.

At every stage of the journey there are events that may threaten your progress, such as a slow-moving tractor, potholes or rain puddles. These events will take a toll on three of the player’s resources: gas, the car’s durability, and the player’s energy as a driver. The game has a very abstract turn-based event system, where you use skills and items from your glove box to eliminate threats (an idea perhaps taken from The Oregon Trail ), which appear as a row of colorful icons at the bottom of the screen. Skills like “Relax” and items like tape all require specific situations and icons to be used, which gives the game some slight puzzle elements.

The external environment also affects these events, creating buffs and debuffs to the player’s journey. Rain will increase gas consumption, and the beautiful forest will inspire the protagonist, allowing certain skills to be used without consumption. You can also pick up hitchhikers, who generally have extra skills but often come with quirks – for example, the wandering composer will get angry if he doesn’t use his skills; the cool young girl will Fill the trunk with useless junk. At the rest stop, you can refuel, buy props that can replenish supplies or some items that can offset debuff effects, and you can even sacrifice some time to find a part-time job to earn some much-needed gas money.

“Keep Driving” is a very nostalgic game. The game is set in the early 2000s, when the protagonist is just out of his teenage years and has bought his first car – maybe a beat-up 1970s muscle car, or maybe a 20s car that looks like a Volvo 200 Series. A boxy sedan from the 1980s. The car has a CD player that plays some garage-band indie rock, and you can stuff the trunk with Coke bottles, guitars, or cases of beer. Skills are represented by blurry Polaroid photos on clips. Sometimes, while you are driving, you will also fall into introspection: My back hurts, I should call my parents, what on earth am I going to do in this life? These problems can be regarded as random events. The system will give multiple options. The choice will have different effects on the physical state – some good and some bad.

The game creates a very special and strong atmosphere, evoking memories of that wandering time in my life. Driving for three days in a row just to play games with friends, this is not only feasible for a young man, but also considered worthy. It’s a great use of time. It reminded me of a hazy, aimless summer just after my 21st birthday when I drove my little red Fiat to visit the homes of some distant friends. Pixel art cars, moody landscapes, and bohemian hitchhiking NPCs are all vividly recreated in the game, accurately conveying the atmosphere of a hipster road coming-of-age movie from the late ’90s.

As it stands, the partially abstract game mechanics are a bit hard to understand. For me at least, using magic and a sword to defeat monsters is obviously a more straightforward way of thinking than using patience (a skill) and chewing gum (an item) to navigate tricky roads. But in the few hours of playing DEMO, “Keep Driving” perfectly aroused the resonance of young people around the world across time. The game truly reproduces the kind of experience that can only be experienced at a stage of life when there is little money but a lot of time. Unstable freedom.

It’s a game about drinking coffee to sustain an all-night drive, sleeping in the back seat, and tying yourself to the car with pizza and duct tape. With the 15-20 hours of gameplay promised by the developers, Keep Driving has the potential to be the perfect road trip-themed game.