Keep Driving is a highway journey sport with boss fights towards tractors, and we will’t put it down

While most driving video games take the apparent route and simulate what it’s like to manage a car, YCJY Games’ Keep Driving as a substitute simulates every little thing that occurs exterior of that. We received’t bemoan the rigours of Le Mans Ultimate for a second, or the flashy licenses of The Crew Motorfest, however on the identical time you’ve merely acquired to respect a sport that allows you to resolve what to place in your glovebox.

Available on Steam now, the nuts and bolts of Keep Driving are bits of roguelikes, journey video games and RPGs. You’re plunged right into a wistful pixel artwork depiction of Noughties America, requested to select a backstory to your younger character, together with what their summer season job is and the way effectively they get on with their mother and father, and let unfastened in a boxy saloon with no specific goal apart from perhaps – in case you really feel prefer it – making it over to a pageant a number of hundred miles away.

It does an important job of capturing the marginally terrifying freedom of being a younger grownup with a automotive and little or no expertise of taking care of oneself. You may go anyplace. The backbreaking load of life’s accumulating obligations has but to search out its approach onto your shoulders. Time feels infinite, however there’s additionally the lingering sense that it’s valuable, and that older individuals view you with envy. How do you have to spend it?

Thankfully Keep Driving doesn’t require you to have the solutions, or certainly any specific plan. Things have a approach of taking place to you when you hit the highway, from hitchhikers who alternate their combine CDs and snacks for secure passage to boss combat occasions towards herds of sheep and tractors.

The exact mechanics of these confrontations are a bit fiddly. They contain matching icons in your dashboard to these in your expertise, which hold down out of your rear view mirror like air fresheners, and if that sounds a bit summary, that’s solely as a result of it completely is. Some of the inherent satisfaction of lastly working your well past a wilfully slow-moving car is misplaced within the combat system, however seeing these encounters depicted as boss battles within the first place is impressed stuff.

There are quite a lot of automobiles you may embark on Keep Driving’s freeform journey with, though all however certainly one of them are locked the primary time you play. Put the hours in, although, and you can begin a brand new journey with a lumbering pickup truck, the type whose suspension forks take a full two seconds to backside out, and an un-named and solely barely overwhelmed up muscle automotive. It might not be essentially the most reliable selection for a cross-country, heavy mileage highway journey, however that’s the good factor about being a younger child on a summer season journey: you’ve acquired license to make these errors.

You’ve additionally acquired quite a few methods out of a sticky state of affairs like a breakdown. If you determined that some expertise working as a mechanic was in your backstory, you may roll your sleeves up and repair it your self. If you’ve acquired a superb relationship together with your mother and father, they’ll come and decide you up. Or perhaps your hitchhiker buddy occurs to know their approach round an engine bay.

The sport pays consideration to all the selections you make alongside the journey, even those you don’t realise you’re making, after which resurfacing them down the highway within the subsequent state of affairs. That makes each journey really feel prefer it’s been written by you, and it makes Keep Driving really feel immersive and stuffed with company and anecdotes, in a approach that’s extraordinarily uncommon in a driving sport.

And if that doesn’t promote you: you choose songs by manually working a CD participant. We have been handed a disc by a stranger in a camper van exterior a petroleum station, slid it into the participant and let the early Noughties jangly emo music ring out. How’s that for immersive?