As neat of an idea as a cross-country road trip roguelike is, Keep Driving doesn’t quite hold our attention to come back for a spin
Keep Driving has an interesting concept. It’s set up as a roadtrip to a music festival, with little events and missions popping up along to help us earn the ability actually get there. We pick an initial location and go, but then need to do plenty after that to make it to the next. The game has a distinct 2D style when the car is moving on the road, but we’re not in that mode for too long. The events we come across are designed to be like little mini-games, with many relying on the cards we collect. This is a card-based roguelike, so that aspect runs deep throughout. The main aspect of the card usage is turn-based, with the goal of essentially matching symbols to survive rounds with the least amount of “damage” as possible. The damage can end up affecting our car, our fuel, our money, our energy — the last thing we want is to have our energy depleted because it means that we’re less aware when we’re driving and can fall asleep.
Another important side of the experience is that we can pick up hitchhikers. These folk not only give us unique quests and missions, but they have their own leveling systems and their own decks that we can play cards against. In one quest I picked up a lost nine-year-old girl who had to be taken home. Along the way to her destination I picked up a couple of other hitchhikers, a punk with a dog and a mechanic type. One of the things that bothered me was that the quest system was screwed up a little bit; I ended up going to this town that the girl was from and it didn’t actually trigger that I could drop her off there. So I was driving around, and thought, I can’t just finish the game with a little girl in my car. It made for a lot of needless driving to actually power through.
Apart from dropping off hitchhikers we can also take on part-time jobs, deliver mail, and do several other tasks to get the money and resources we need to make our goal.
There’s an inventory management system, so we can use items to give ourselves more energy and repair and upgrade our car; we can add a spoiler if we want to, or a paint job, and we can drink beer for some reason. That may not be the most legal thing to do while we’re driving IRL, but because we can sell almost everything we own enjoying a few brews and selling half a case for cash isn’t uncommon.
I think the big thing about this game that owns is that it feels like a game that’s made for millennials that have done road trips without GPS or any technology. We have a map and we’re just driving. It definitely feels like we’re back in 2001, driving to Sault Ste. Marie to visit our brother. It just nails that atmosphere.
Developer Y/CJ/Y’s Keep Driving is a good experience. I don’t know if I’m going to actually play it again because I don’t necessarily think that it’s a particularly good replayable game, but I got what I wanted out of it. There isn’t really a push to try out different strategies each run, apart from a few end states, but it does hit that nostalgia button. There’s a CD player in the car and we can queue up songs, but only six at a time. So, we have to pick six songs, put the CD into the player, and then press play. We’re actually pressing the play button. It’s silly, and it’s worth trying, just like a lot of other parts of the game. It’s worth playing, but maybe just not over and over again.
This review is based on a Steam code sent to SideQuesting by the publisher. The video first appeared on the March 3rd, 2025 episode of The SideQuest.
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