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You Can Now Take a Road Trip Without Leaving Your Keyboard
A new video game brings all the freedom—and the perils—of the open road to your PC. Keep Driving is a role playing game (RPG) that puts you in the driving seat for a cross-country road trip.
Your destination is a music festival and even before you set out you’ll have some important decisions to make. In the setup phase you can decide on your job (if you have one), your car, and even how well you get on with your folks, just in case they need to bail you out down the road.
Then you pack you car, plan your route and hit the gas. Along the way you’ll face a variety of obstacles, just as you would on a real road trip, from running low on fuel, to foul weather, traffic jams, cops, and even a little road rage. You can pick up hitch-hikers or take on a side hustle to raise money as you go to help fund the trip.
“It’s the early 2000’s, and you’ve just bought your first car. A long, slow summer lies ahead. Hearing about a festival on the other side of the country, you fire up your engine, plot a course on your map, and hit the road. How, if you get there at all, is up to you,” says the Swedish developer Y/CJ/Y. Keep Driving has been inspired by films including Two Lane Blacktop and Paris Texas, and the developer’s own road trip experiences, they say.
Make no mistake this isn’t actually a driving game as such and you won’t be steering at speed through the scenery. Instead there’s a turn-by-turn approach, with each bringing a new challenge to overcome. You tackle these problems by dragging and dropping pop-up icons onto your dashboard or into the car itself.
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The graphics are deliberately basic, a retro 8-bit pixel art style that may remind you of classic 80s’ console or arcade titles. The cars featured are also suitably classic, with a Volvo-like 1981 sedan, a Toyota-wannabe 1988 truck, or a Camaro-esque 1970 muscle car to choose from.
The whole game feels like a cool throwback to those carefree days when you could just drop everything and drive. Now, instead of several weeks, you just need a few hours at your keyboard for a great escape.
You can find Keep Driving on Steam priced at $17.99.
Yeah, maybe I’ll look into playing this right after I get back from my next couple of hundred real driving experiences…or maybe not.
Test Drive Unlimited was more fun. You had the big island of Hawaii to play with.
OK upon laughing at the trailer, I have to ask what the heck is going on at 1:54 in the trailer. I don’t know why that would pop up. Also the U2-ish song is interesting with the vocal choice on it. I felt like I was at a karaoke bar.
It was some weirdly named item that you unlocked during gameplay. What it is, I have no idea.
Funny that on the shots of the Volvo looking car where the rear end was out of the screen, it looks exactly like a Dodge Omni.
So, Oregon Trail but in a modern roadtrip setting.
I think this is what you do until you actually get your first car. The two minute promo completely satisfied my longing for 8-bit nostalgia. The song was pleasant though….There. I said something nice.