From the creators titles like Post Void and Sea Salt comes YCJY Games’ latest titled ‘Keep Driving”. It is a 2D pixel art role-playing game where we drive to transport hitchhikers, work odd jobs and take care of our car as we journey across the country. The game released on February 6th and already has an ‘Overwhelmingly Positive” review on Steam.
Management Sim Meets RPG
Keep driving is a title that manages to combine elements of management sims, a survival game or an just another RPG but labeling as such does a disservice to reduce the game to just that. The game manages to give a perfect blend of these mentioned genres to present an interesting and unique experience.
The developers went above and beyond to capture the early 2000s era and specifically the experience of taking a cross country trip. For example at the beginning of the game, we get a choice of picking licensed songs to burn into a CD which then is our soundtrack for the rest of the journey.
The game even manages to present meaningful decision making when interacting with other NPCs and there are even choices that get made without the player even realizing it which of course present different scenarios later on.
Decisions To Make, Traffic Jams To Defeat
The main premise of the game is that we have to meet a friend of ours on the other side of the country for a music festival. Whatever we do, until we reach that destination is up to us. There are various locations that fall on the way and it’s up to us to decide what we do to earn money and survive until we get there.
Since the game is all about being on the road, the developers managed to add an interesting “combat” system into the mix, where our enemies will be unexpected traffic jams or a herd of sheep blocking the road. Sometimes there will be randomly generated events like aggressive tailgators, navigating unexpected lands while stopped at some checkpoint or it could just be navigating hectic lanes while driving.
These events will serve to lower one of the four key resources we have, which are Energy, Money, Car Durability and Fuel. We as the player have to defend ourselves against these events using our own skill cards or the skill cards of the hitchhikers we are helping.
The actual battling involves matching the pattern of the skill cards available to us to that of the pattern of the enemy’s attacks as closely as possible, getting a perfect match means we got a “perfect hit” and thus we get another turn.
Subtle But Meaningful
While the overall premise of the game may seem simple enough there are subtle but noticeable mechanics in the game that keeps it interesting and replayable. The game takes notice of the player’s each and every action. There is a benefit and a consequence to each action we take, for example if we keep choosing to sleep in our car, instead of any hotel nearby we will soon get the “cold” and “dirty” status effects.
These in turn make it so that our hitchhikers get less experience points meaning they won’t be as useful in battles. Another example would be that if we are low on energy we can buy a coffee from any coffee shop we come across, but we have to drink it quickly to remove the ‘Tired’ status effect otherwise it will get cold and our character will throw it out.
If we then choose not to buy coffee but rather keep buying sodas and candy bars to sustain ourselves we would then soon get the “sugar addict” effect which gives us one energy point for each sugar treat consumed but we will always have the ‘Tired’ effect with us.
Conclusion
Keep Driving is a beautiful title with roguelike elements that slowly pulls you into its interesting and unique world. The roguelike elements get slowly introduced and what may look like a relaxing game on the surface soon turns into the combination of RPG and management sim with us having to keep tracking of all our statuses and resources.
There is a massive amount of replayability here with the amount of freedom we get when we make decisions. Each run can take only 30 mins to an hour to complete but the depth in terms of gameplay is simply astonishing for a game like this, making it a worthwhile purchase for anybody looking for a unique experience in indie gaming.
