The perfect road trip game has been a white whale for me since 3D polygons started showing off their seductive depth in video games. The game I envision requires four things: a car, an open road, a certain vibe, and a dash of challenge. It’s a Venn diagram that never seems to find all the circles crossing over. I’ve found games that have three of the requirements, but none that have all four.

Does Keep Driving, the newest title from Post Void devs YCJY Games, manage to finally unite these four very specific criteria? Technically!

NOT OUTRIGHT YES

The reason why it’s not an outright yes is because you don’t actually drive. The car drives itself with you viewing its journey from a side-on angle. Despite the road trip subject matter, it isn’t a driving game, it’s most similar to the classic edutainment game, Oregon Trail. It’s just, instead of trying to survive the frontier, you’re just enjoying some petrol-powered wandering, and rather than hunting wildlife for food, you cram Doritos into your maw.

It casts you as someone enjoying the last days of their youth. High school is in the rearview mirror, you’ve got your license, and contributing to society can wait. The goal that is handed to you is a music festival that begins four weeks after the beginning of the game, but that’s only one of a few possible end goals. Others, such as winning a race or climbing a mountain, can be discovered on your journey, and each have their own requirements to complete.

Having an end goal isn’t really the point, though. They provide tidy conclusions, but truly, like any good road trip, it’s about the adventure. You’re given a rather expansive map spider-webbed with roads of varying quality. You choose your next destination, then you’re off on the open road.

In lieu of actually driving the car, you’re hit with random events at regular intervals. Some of these are sometimes amusing self-reflections that can provide you with temporary buffs or debuffs, but usually, it’s something happening on the road. Everything from pot-holes to tailgaters, you get hit with a bar filled with icons representing the game’s four currencies: fuel, car durability, your own energy, and cash. You have a set of abilities that you can expand, as well as stuff you can jam in your glove box that will neutralize all the icons on the bar. To keep your ride smooth, you need to eliminate those icons before they can drain your resources.

That’s generally the central challenge of the Keep Driving. You simply need to survive to the next town. It’s not terribly strict. You have options to recover from catastrophe. During character setup, you can actually define how solid your relationship with your parents is, so if the egg hits the weedwhacker, you can give them a call. If they like you, they’ll bail you out. It is possible to fail; I just never even came close.

THE EGG HITS THE WEEDWHACKER

That’s not to say I didn’t have rough patches, but Keep Driving doesn’t want to stress you out. As I said, I never hit a fail state. Never came close. Didn’t even have to call my parents. As long as you have some money in your pocket, you’re gold. And there are a lot of ways to make money, including just straight up working. In a way, I would love more of a challenge. But also, any frustration would have totally killed the game for me. Like any frustration would have harshed the vibe. Probably better that it leans easier.

And four weeks is a lot of time in Keep Driving. There’s plenty of time for aimlessness, but to its credit, it gives you a lot to fill it. As I mentioned, the festival is but what outcome for the ending. You pick up other “letters” as you explore, and opening each one will give you a new goal.

Likewise, there are hitchhikers that show up rather regularly, and each has their own “thing.” They kind of come in the way of side-tasks and endgame goals. The guy I encountered the most was this hiker dude who wants to go to the base of the mountain. But I also picked up a party gurl who gave me a side-mission to drive drunk. Not even once, sister. But she also allowed me to shoplift small items, which was pretty cool. I mean, don’t do that, children. At least, not while anyone is looking.

The first time I played, I was simply working my way to the festival. Halfway there, I got a letter from a doctor saying my grandmother was dying and wanted to see me one last time. I’m not sure why a doctor is sending a postcard like that, but the festival can wait; Gam-gam can’t.

LET ME DROWN IN YOU

I don’t think I’ve encountered every hitchhiker, and I’m not sure just how many there are. There are ones that I encountered multiple times, but I’d always find new ones. I didn’t, however, find one that stole my kidneys. Not one tried to harvest my precious meats. Disappointing. There was only the aforementioned girl who wanted me to drink and drive, which is just reprehensible.

I know, I know. It would severely mess with the vibes if you were lured to an isolated cabin and carved up like a Christmas ham. And those vibes are precious. YCJY Games obviously put a lot of focus on nailing the atmosphere of a road trip montage. The moment you hit the gas, the soundtrack kicks in. The offensively, aggressively incredible soundtrack.

Listen, of course I had never heard of Westkust. I had never heard of Holy Now. I had never heard of Crystal Boys or Zimmer Grandioso. For the most part, they are indie bands from Scandinavia, and I hail from the land of Stompin’ Tom. However, I now can’t imagine bands better suited for road trip listening. They mostly feature swirling compositions filled with reverb and crunch to give them a lo-fi sound.

You start off with a selection of songs (Westkust is heavily emphasized at the start) and can buy more CDs that crop up randomly in shops. You’re also sometimes given songs by other characters, and they range from a new setlist of titles to just one. Luck of the draw, though the CDs are usually labeled with what band they belong to. Once you have them, you can queue them up on the vehicle’s disc player. You can put together a playlist of six songs, or you can just hit shuffle. There’s a car upgrade that expands this to eight, but that’s sort of a waste of an upgrade slot when you can just shuffle whenever the list runs out.

GAS MONEY

I can’t stress how much the music selection contributes to the success of the overall aesthetic. The art style is fine. It’s a convincing pixel-art graphical style with a colour/fuzz filter over top. You can use an item to trade for different camera colourizations if you’re hip. It looks fine.

Where it does excel visually is in its backgrounds. They aren’t just pre-determined backdrops mapped to specific parts of the road; they seem to be procedurally stitched together on the fly. What you see is based on what terrain you’re on in the world (city, forest, desert, etc), and what kind of road you’re on (highway, backroad, etc). There are moments where you can essentially pause the game with the background still scrolling along (such as changing your playlist), and it just continues generating new scenery. I wouldn’t call myself a game designer, so I don’t know if this is an impressive technical feat, but it is an appreciable attention to detail. After all, what is a road trip aside from watching the world change around you while music plays on the radio? Salty snacks, I guess.

So, when it comes down to it, yeah, Keep Driving is a convincing facsimile of a road trip. It’s possibly the best translation of the activity that the medium has seen. It isn’t, perhaps, what I would consider the perfect road trip game, simply because you don’t actually get behind the wheel. What it does accomplish, it does with spectacular aplomb. So, regardless of whether or not it’s the final word in road tripping, it’s a terrific stop on the journey.

8/10

This review was conducted using a digital version of the game. It was provided by the developer.