The concept of the “Road Trip” in an American sense eludes me. I’m British, if I drove for more than a few hours I’m going to end up in the ocean… or worse, France. Jokes aside, I feel like Keep Driving also eludes me for similar reasons. I just have no point of reference.
Keep Driving is a management RPG in which you create a character, and then hit the open road to attend a festival with friends. The road is long and winding, and you will face trials and tribulations, meet hitchhikers, and have a grand old time.
If you want to compare this to other games, think of it as a weird mix between an RPG and a survival sim. You have to manage several kinds of statuses, you can recruit party members who can level up, and there’s turn-based “combat”. So let’s talk about how this works mechanically.
Encounters basically break down into you taking a turn, and then the “enemy” (be that a truck you want to overtake, or some other nebulous situation) taking theirs. On your turn, you will see a series of symbols, representing things like time, energy, money (all the survival-sim style meters you have to control), and above them you can see your enemies intentions. The symbols might attack (deplete the associated meter), change, duplicate, you get the idea.
On your turn, you can either use your skills (some use up resources, some have limited uses) or items to destroy these symbols by lining up their own corresponding attack. If you perfectly match up the symbols, you get an extra attack before the enemy can go. I really hope this makes sense with an associated screenshot because it’s a pig to explain like this, but I promise it makes sense as you play.
Between these encounters you can pick up hitchhikers who join your party, bringing their own quests and skills, go shopping for items, visit the garage to upgrade your car, and more! This is where I hit my issue though. If that exclamation mark implied some form of joy or excitement, I apologise for misleading you. Keep Driving is an exercise in tedium.
Now don’t get me wrong, in concept, I was really hooked on the idea. The open road is a vast, mysterious place. There’s something incredibly romantic about the idea of a long journey (even if the scales of what’s in my head to what is being talked about here differ). I jumped at the chance to review Keep Driving, I wanted to love it, but I cannot bring myself to recommend it.
The pixel art presentation is muddy, evocative of the Atari and Commodore era of visuals. The music is light and playful, unironically excellent driving music for sure, but in the blandness of the gameplay experience it sticks out like a sore thumb. Just because combat is easy to understand does not mean it is easy to actually play, and the minimalist design of the UI does technically convey everything you need to know, but it doesn’t really make it easy to decide what to do with it.
In the end, Keep Driving is a faithful rendition of a long roadtrip. Even if I may not get it, it’s something somebody else may enjoy.
Keep Driving was reviewed on Xbox Series X, but is also available on Nintendo Switch, Playstation 5, and Steam.