Brendan Caldwell
It’s not the destination, they say, it’s the pickled eggs we slurped along the way. In Keep Driving, a turn-based RPG of swishing scenery and smooshed roadkill, you are on a road trip in the early 2000s that will see you gulping coffee and stuffing cheap snacks into your mouth, all in an effort to get to the other side of the country in time for the big concert. It is a hypnotically involving game of picking up hitchhikers and battling tailgaters, a pixel art drivealong with tactile, chunky buttons and perfectly suited sound effects, as much fuelled by nostalgia as it is by gasoline. At first, I thought it was too loose and open-ended to elicit any deep feelings. But then I had to sell my guitar for half a tank of petrol, just to visit my dying grandmother. Dude, this is a game that goes places.
Before we get to poor granny, let’s take stock. It’s day one of your trip, and you create a simple character. Maybe you’re unemployed, or a part-time car mechanic. I chose to be a student (more options unlock when you complete the game). You also choose some items to bring with you. Maybe mum’s care package, with its sensible jerrycan of gas? Nope. I took the case of beer and my prized guitar. All this squeezes into the boxy inventory of your car’s boot. As for the car itself, you might like the look of the characterful muscle car or hefty truck, but I went with the hideously average 1981 Sedan. Unlike the other vehicles on offer, it can hold four passengers. This, for me, would become massively important.
The actual driving is (mostly) done automatically. You tell the car where to go using a road map and handy signposts at each rest stop, small town, or city. In these nodes of commerce you’ll have to stock up on items for the journey and slot them into the grid-based trunk. You can lower the middle seat to make even more storage space for beer, crisps, nuts, books, gas cans, spray paint, hot dogs, noodles, stoves, car parts, spare tires… There’s a lot on offer and money isn’t always forthcoming, so you’ll often have to make hard decisions about what to buy and what to leave on the shelf. It’s like if the bloke from Neo Scavenger owned a station wagon. Each item is useful in its own way. But you might not see how until you get into a scrape on the road.
These are called “road events” – basically turn-based battles against tractors, potholes, cyclists, or kids playing in the middle of the god damn road. Each encounter is announced with a stylish flourish of text scrolling past you like any other car that whooshes by on the motorway. “ABANDONED CAR,” it might say, before you approach a rusty old wreck. Or “ROAD KILL” before bringing you to a halt in front of an unidentifiable animal corpse. Speed cameras, cops, tailgaters, even arguments between your hitchhiking companions qualify as events. Some of them made me laugh out loud. “BEE IN THE CAR” deadpans one pre-battle message. “BIRDS THAT WON’T MOVE,” warns another as you approach a bunch of crows who refuse to clear a path.
What unfolds is a kind of card-based battle. Some polaroid snapshots hang from your rearview mirror, each a draggable skill that will neutralise an incoming attack. It’s a simple enough game of matching icons and avoiding status effects. Red gasoline attacks will lower your petrol tank. Green social attacks will lower your personal energy. Blue durability attacks will put a dent in your car’s physical health meter. You won’t always be able to guard all attacks at once, and have to minimise incoming damage according to your needs. If you’re low on fuel, for example, maybe it’s better to take a hit to your chassis.
Those items from the store will help. Use duct tape to avoid damage to the car, smoke a cigarette to avoid losing a pip of energy. You might also get status ailments as you travel. I once drank a late night bottle of wine at a rest stop only to wake with a “headache” status. It meant any future attack would do double damage. Normally, you wait for this headache to pass. But I had been carrying aspirin from the beginning of the trip precisely for this moment. I wouldn’t have drunk the stupid wine anyway, if it weren’t for a peer pressuring friend – a hitchhiker nicknamed “The Hurricane”.
These hitchhikers slot into the car seats and offer extra skills to use in battle. They also level up alongside you in interesting ways. The Punk will fend off gasoline threats with aggressive abandon, and comes with a dog who takes up an extra space in the car. But at level three he suddenly becomes vegan, and you become unable to buy meat or dairy products from shops. Another passenger, the Mechanic, will smoke any cigarettes you leave in your glove box. My wine-sipping friend, the Hurricane, leaves litter in the car that takes up space, causing you to clean it out at every stop. She’s dreadful.
These are thematic annoyances that give the game its flavour. But there is less intentional friction when it comes to managing inventory. It’s fiddly to rotate items, for example, and I never figured out a way to easily transfer objects between the trunk and my nice roof rack (a shopping trolley strapped to the top of the sedan).
Examining and swapping skills can also be a chore. The neat-looking polaroids are arranged in a scrapbook, but you have to right click each one to remind yourself of its powers. It looks great, but that style comes at the expense of being able to compare skills in a more readable way. It’s clunky when compared with the card selection screens of any solid deckbuilder, where each card’s effects are made clear at a glance.
But neither this nor the occasional bug on the windshield killed the strong atmosphere of the game’s premise. It’s an absorbing road trip not just in the pixel scenery that passes by (fields of lavender, forests, mountain ranges, distant lakes) but also in the random chit-chat your passengers make with one another. Their idle thoughts on books, comments on the state of your car, bite-sized anecdotes of their adventures on the road. There’s a loving amount of detail to this trip, right down to the music that you collect and play along the way.
Your CD player can only queue six songs at a time, so you have to manually eject and choose another set of songs every time the music runs out. This periodic pushing of the eject and shuffle buttons became, for me, a kind of ritual. It adds absolutely nothing to your stats. It offers you no pre-battle benefits. And yet I felt compelled to prod my finger into this chonky pixel machinery every half a dozen songs. God. I think I’m a little bit in love with this thing.
It’s unexpectedly heartfelt at times, too. My opening quest – to reach the Way Out music festival – eventually became a secondary destination, supplanted by my punk friend’s desire to find a rare club in the big city. The game’s open-ended rhythm reflects the forking paths of want that crop up in any road trip tale. At one point, I received a letter (somehow) from my grandmother. She wrote that she was dying. She wanted to see me one last time.
Okay, the quest was titled “Inheritance”, so my money-starved pockets led the way. But when we reached grandma, she blessed me not with cash, but with a plot of land. The trouble? It was way back west. Just a few miles from the one horse town I started in. It’s implied that grandma died shortly afterwards.
I ended up staying in that midwestern city far longer than anywhere else. I took temp job after temp job at an employment office, my negative debuffs stacking up. I was tired (energy bars can’t be refilled). I was hungry (energy costs increased by 1). I was dirty (hitchhikers gain less XP). The game recognised what I was doing and labelled me with the trait “workaholic” poking fun with a description that reads: “Aren’t you supposed to be on a road trip?”
In another game, this might feel like manipulating the game’s systems. But here the soulless gig economy stopover felt appropriate. If this was a road trip movie, I realised, this would be the struggling lowlight of the trip. Two of my three buddies have gone their own way. My only remaining car pal was a dude who kept falling asleep in the passenger seat, and the hairy, silent dog. We were broke, knackered, low on gas, and even lower on spirit. I drove across the country for this? I sold my guitar in a pawn shop in Bumfuck, Nowhere…. FOR THIS?
Three days pass without us driving anywhere. Just: sleep, work, sleep, work, sleep, work. The game’s calendar tracks the days that pass with an almost Persona-like attention, the quest to get to the music festival has a deadline circled in red ink three weeks from now. I have given up on that dream. Not out of time constraints, but because I have become dedicated to roleplaying dejection and loss. Dude, my grandmother just died.
But her last wishes remain. She wanted me to go back home. To find that plot of land and see what I can do with it. Hmmm. The calendar says I have two whole months to get there. I could take my time. We could see the country, go on hiking trails! I’m not being colourful here, the hikes are small first-person dungeon-crawly walkabouts that offer bits of loot, sometimes found in country stopovers. The road trip is not over yet.
I would later learn that fulfilling granny’s dying wishes is just one of nine possible endings for the game (a summary of your trip gets scribbled into a notebook alongside a photo of the old banger that took you everywhere). And you can start the game again with all your car’s upgrades installed (shopping trolley roof included). But right now, in the city, I’m not even thinking of that. I just want to be back on the road.
I rev the engine. I draw a red circle around a city to the north that I know nothing about. I retune my skills so I don’t need to rely on the punk’s gas-guzzling breath to survive encounters anymore. Leaving the city, I get another message: wait, says a business firm, we can offer you a permanent position! You were working so hard!
I mentally stuff the letter into my glove box with all the candy wrapper trash, where it belongs, and turn to my sleepy friend, out like a light. The dog behind me watches in the rearview. This city sucks. Time to go home.
ranzware
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