The Modern Oregon Trail
HIGH The atmosphere is off the charts.
LOW Having hitchhiker penalties without hitchhiker bonuses.
WTF Chain smoking cigarettes to combat a child peeing.
Hi everyone, Eugene Sax here with another review from GameCritics.com.
A new ride, a tank of gas, an invite to a music festival, and an entire summer ahead of me. What new adventures await? I have all summer to find out. Keep Driving aims to capture that sense of freedom and adventure by placing players behind the wheel of a new car with endless opportunity ahead of them.
In this resource management RPG, players will travel across procedurally generated roads with the ultimate goal of meeting up with friends at a music festival. Players will collect resources and items, obtain skill cards, pick up hitchhikers and upgrade their car in order to keep driving. As players obtain different items like food, extra gas cans, a spare tire and so on, they have to organize the items inside their trunk to make it all fit — imagine the inventory system of something like Resident Evil 4 and you’re on the right track. If there’s not enough space in the trunk for an item, players will have to either throw something away to make room or put the back seats down to create a bit more space.
Both items and skills come into play in Keep Driving’s version of combat. As players drive around the world, there will be random events that players must deal with — muddy roads, being stuck in a traffic jam, cameras looking for speeding drivers, and more. These events will threaten the player’s four attributes, gas, car durability, money, and energy, so preparing for the unexpected is a key part of play.
If players can’t deal with road events with the items they have on hand, they might incur a more serious situation, like the car running out of gas or breaking down. Things like this will stop the trip and force the player to take more drastic action, like walking to a gas station if they have the money and the energy to do so. If all else fails, players can take a chance and call their parents which may give them the resources they need to keep going, or it will end the game if their parents don’t pick up.
One other resource, and a unique one, are the hitchhikers.
These passengers to be picked up run a wide gamut — you might find a musician who requires room for his guitar, a convict on the run from the law, a “free spirit” party girl, and more. If you decide to give one a ride, they come with additional skill cards players can use for road events. However, they can also have some drawbacks as well. For example, The Convict makes the player drive faster, which results in fewer road events between destinations and a higher chance to get pulled over by cops. The longer hitchhikers stay in the car with the player, the additional skills will be unlocked for use.
The hitchhikers aren’t just resources, though — I’d say they’re the soul of the game.
As players drive between destinations, there will occasionally be bits of dialogue that come up between the player and any passengers they’ve picked up. Bit by bit, they start revealing their past and their stories, fleshing things out in simple, but effective ways. They don’t become friends for life, though. Hitchhikers eventually ask the player to help them accomplish their own goals, and completing them may mean they leave the car, and there were many times when I was sad to see one go.
Another aspect that solidifies the experience of Keep Driving is the goal of getting to the music festival. Actually getting there is just one of a handful of final outcomes, but it doesn’t matter which one the player ultimately wants to pursue on their playthrough. One time in the middle of a run I got a letter from my grandmother asking me to come visit her at the hospital. I detoured, and when I got there, she told me that there was a plot of land she wanted me to have as an inheritance, triggering a new destination to open up on my map. Quests like these are clearly marked to let the player know if following them will end a run, so my choice boiled down to getting my inheritance or continuing to the music festival with friends. That freeform feeling of choosing your own adventure is really the spirit that Keep Driving is trying to capture, I think.
The gripes I have about Keep Driving are minor. There are a few minor bugs here and there, like one time when I tried to change tires on the car and the spare tire was displayed outside of the inventory space. Another glitch was when I got penalties for having hitchhikers, even though they weren’t in the car. Otherwise, the randomness can sometimes make a run last much longer than it needs to. At one point I had to spend nearly an hour driving between two cities in an effort to make the game spawn a car upgrade I needed for a specific ending. Minor issues all, really.
Overall, I was hooked by the atmosphere and easy-to-learn management of this summer road trip. In a time where games can be a wonderful escape from current world events, Keep Driving brought me back to a younger time when a car meant freedom and opportunity, and a reminder of those good times was more than welcome. As such, Keep Driving is an easy recommendation for sure!
For me: Keep Driving gets 8.5 liters of gas out of 10
Disclosures: This game is developed and published by YCJY Games. It is currently available on PC. This copy of the game was obtained via publisher and reviewed on the PC. Approximately 10 hours of play were spent playing the game, and multiple endings were completed. There are no multiplayer modes.
Parents: This game is not rated through the ESRB. There are numerous references to drugs and alcohol. There are some sex references in one of the endings, and there is significant cursing in some of the music tracks and some of the character dialogue. Not recommended for young children.
Colorblind Modes: Colorblind Modes are not present.
Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: This game offers subtitles, but subtitles can not be altered and/or resized. There are no relevant audio cues needed for gameplay. The game is fully accessible.
Remappable controls: Controls are not remappable, and there is no control scheme. Currently the game only supports keyboard and mouse, with the mouse controlling everything. The developer has said that controller support will be coming in a future update.
While Sonic and Street Fighter were great places to start, his first love was Final Fantasy X when his dad bought a PS2. Ever since, that love for gaming has evolved -- there are a number of game worlds out there, and he intends to explore them all. RPG to horror, platformers to casual and everything in between -- if it’s available, he’ll play it.
While his time is short between writing reviews, tabletop gaming, and attempting to start a cheesecake business, he has caught all 806 pokemon and can speedrun Star Fox 64 in less than 40 minutes. He’s always looking for new things to try and new challenges to conquer. You can find him on Twitter -- @eugene_sax.
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