Sometimes, you just wanna toss an N64 cartridge in your trunk and drive cross-country to game with an old friend, and as unlikely a concept for a video game as that might seem, it's exactly what you do in Keep Driving. This RPG's offbeat approach to its unusual subject matter instantly charmed me, and while there are some rough edges in its Steam Next Fest demo, I can't wait to see more.
You start by naming your character and choosing a few character traits, like your current job status and how good your relationship with your parents is. From there, you load up your trunk with a bit of Resident Evil-style inventory Tetris, and select your next destination from a map. Your car starts up and gets moving without your input, leaving you to sit back and respond to the various events that unfold.
The heart of the game is in random events, where you might get stuck behind a tractor, see a bit of roadkill, or have to deal with an argument between the hitchhikers you've picked up. These events threaten limited resources like energy, car durability, and gas with a lineup of little icons across the bottom of the screen, and you've got a list of skills you can use to wipe out those icons before they drain your resources.
It is, admittedly, a pretty abstract system to wrap your head around, and even in game it took me more than a few rounds to come to grips with. But once it starts to click, there's a lot of fun strategic decisions to make. One of the hitchhikers I picked up - a traveling musician - had an ability that would let me spend energy to turn incoming damage icons into music notes, which also destroy adjacent icons when taken out. Paired with my starting ability that let me regain energy after events, it turned into a powerful combo.
I'm not sure a full icon-swapping game would really capture my interest, but it all works together with the game's aesthetic to build interesting stories. I ran out of energy at one point when overusing the music ability, falling asleep at the wheel while that musician hitchhiker just kept making up songs about roadkill. I chugged a two-liter soda bottle I'd picked up two towns ago for the pick-me-up I needed to reach the next city.
The Keep Driving demo on Steam is a little rough around the edges - it can be a little difficult to parse what's happening in the (very pretty) UI, and my initial session was cut short by a bug that kept me from being able to close the map. But I want to go back and see more. The devs cite games like FTL and Oregon Trail 2 as inspirations, and it's those sorts of games that I think Keep Driving most evokes - little sandboxes whose random events smartly come together to make stories out of the mundanity of travel.
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