Every road trip should contain good music, beers, great company, the open road, a map and perhaps a spare wheel or two for the 'sensible' types. Keep Driving from Y/CJ/Y ticks all of those boxes - not necessarily in that order, as the motivation for the outing isn't about finding oneself but heading to a mate's house to play a video game. Nerd.
Keep Driving didn't have controller support, so it was a mixture of mouse and keyboard, which wasn't friendly to start with, though once covering the basics, it worked. You don't have a complete agency of the car; you can only move it left and right at checkpoint areas such as fuel stations, local shops, and picking up hitchhikers. From each milestone, you access a world map, plot your path like in Heading Out, and then sit back and enjoy the tunes.
Keep Driving Demo Preview
The tunes are absolutely amazing and were the first thing that won me over. After getting a few miles under your belt, you soon unlock a verb wheel type thing where you can access your car's trunk, plot your path, kick out passengers, and pick the tracks on the playlist. This isn't DAB or Spotify, but old-school tactile knobs and dials. Hh-mm - nostalgia is kicking in of the good ol' days of mixtapes and flipping over the cassettes, playing them to death until they physically can't work any more. And, after the music lures you in, so do the visuals and, most importantly, the gameplay.
As an RPG, Keep Driving is about managing resources. Before driving away, though, you can select a few traits for your protagonist, such as skills and their profession (if they have one), and then you will have access to some inventory items. Only the sedan is on offer out of three options. Presumably, a truck will allow more gear at the expense of finesse, and the muscle car will have limited space but will turn a few heads while burning through fuel. By applying a Dredge-like inventory management approach, placing items in the back and the footwells, passengers can be manipulated, too. So what of the items - how do they work?
Source: PR
Defensive Driving
Because you aren't directly controlling the car, you'll enter events called 'Threats' where you must manage your resources to counter potential pitfalls such as energy loss, flat tyres and depleted fuel. Your driver has a skillset that is dragged over the threat icon like an overlay to cancel them out, plus items from your glovebox or boot (trunk) can do the same thing. If you don't have the correct item to counter a threat, you lose attributes such as money or energy. On the flip side, if you eliminate multiple threats simultaneously, you'll get a perfect hit, which plays like an Uno wildcard, and you can cancel out any risk.
After completing an event, you'll pull up at the local garage or similar and will have the opportunity to buy items - as long as you have the money and space. Odd jobs counter this, and again, referring to your skillset, you can perform an automated job to earn some cash. This is where you fill up on fuel, fix any issues, and have a quick time out to decide whether that person you picked up earlier is worthy of your time. They have their own skill sets, plus they level up with progress. There's not enough scope for a demo, but Keep Driving successfully showcases more of the features to expect when this is released later in the year.
I initially thought, 'Yeah, this is quite retro and quirky. It looks pretty cool', but limited to that alone. However, when actually on the road listening to those tunes and then planning for the trip ahead - not with a cheap A-Z from the services but packing items to pre-empt potential issues, it comes across as Final Fantasy on wheels without the bromance. Alright, a bit of hyperbole, yet I really like this and suggest you try the Keep Driving demo and add it to your wishlist immediately. Otherwise, you'll get a puncture, and your head gasket will go tits up. Not that I'm wishing that on you, but if you wishlist the game, it won't happen. I think.
Keep Driving is part of the Steam Next Fest, available from the 14th of October 2024.
