Just after I graduated high school, probably the most precious thing I owned was my car. I was a kid who never wanted to be at home, and when I got old enough I was lucky to get a car from my Dad who worked at a car dealership. I was raised in a quiet little town in New Hampshire, and going anywhere in most of the state usually meant driving. Like many other women I know, before I was a beautiful woman, I was a sad boy, and I wanted to disappear. Me and my high school friends, all feeling lost and a little directionless both in our personal lives and in the transition to adulthood, disappeared for days at a time on little road trips around New England. For the last years of our childhood, we would drive late at night to Hampton Beach to see the ocean, or to Boston or Portland just to see another city, just to get out of the house. Sometimes we would drive for no reason at all, in whatever direction. We were always driving somewhere. I have fond and difficult memories of this time, and all of the seemingly unused construction sites, fields, and parking lots where we would park my car in to spend the night, picking flowers in the grass and smoking weed on the top of my car. It’s complicated, and once I became independent and got my own place, I started to look back at this time with a nostalgic sadness.
For me, Keep Driving is this nostalgic sadness. Stressing about gas on the way to the next station, worrying about that weird noise the car is making, listening to CDs lent by friends or strangers, eating last nights pizza on the road to the next rest stop, arguing in the car, hitting pot holes, meeting questionable hitchhikers and new, equally directionless friends: this is what Keep Driving is about. The premise is this: I’ve just bought my first car. I have a little bit of cash, a tank full of gas, and a long summer alone. I have a map and a letter from a friend telling me about a music festival hundreds of miles away which I absolutely must go to. The rest is left up to something between choice and chance; which route I take, which hitchhikers I meet on the side of the road, and how (or if) me and my car can even make it to the festival. Between rest stops, gas stations, and towns, I drive, picking up strangers with different tricks to help along the way. Occasionally I’ll get stopped by random encounters like “getting lost” or “potholes” or “birds that won’t move.” These encounters are temporary annoyances, but since I’m driving, they drain me of resources; gas, the wear and tear on my car, my energy and money. The less resources I have, the more difficult choices I’m forced to make. I begin to think, am I gonna have to buy some shitty gas station pizza to keep myself from going hungry? Can I afford gas to get us to the next stop? Should I go hungry and risk running out of gas just to save money on my way to a repair shop? But what if I hit a toll!!!!!!!! Keep Driving is a management RPG that puts us in these situations the whole way, right up until the car breaks down or I run out of gas. Then I’ll have to call my parents.
On the character creation screen, one of the first things the game asks me about is my relationship with my parents. “A good relationship with your parents can help you in a pinch!” When this first prompts me, it’s unclear what they mean by this, but they give me a scale from 1 to 5 and I pick a number that will remain undisclosed. Much, much later, there’s this missing little kid that’s been in my car for a couple towns now because she got on the wrong bus and doesn’t know where her home is, and while I’m finally on the way to bring her home, my car breaks down in the middle of the highway. I’m given a couple choices on how to deal with this, but out of options and resources, my last chance is to call my parents. It turns out that just like real life, the probability that my parents pick up my phone call depends on my relationship to them. They might pick up the phone to come and bail me out of my problem here, but if they don’t, it’s game over. It’s always the last option to keep going on the road, and if there’s no answer, it makes for a sad and childish ending, humiliating in a very teenage way. And to me this is what’s beautiful about the game, it understands this teenage angst and this feeling of being lost and how humiliating and sad it can be to have to go home. When this happened to me in game, it reminded me of when I was a 17 year old in 2015, unable to vote in the big presidential election, very closeted, very scared for my future, full of frustration, powerless, and driving every day. One of those nights I did something kind of stupid: me and a friend stole a lot of campaign signs from people’s yards and then drove my car into a giant Trump sign on the side of the road somewhere (also undisclosed). It felt really good to knock it over and break its supports, I felt righteous, a very dramatic and thoughtless teenage gesture. It wasn’t until about five minutes later, feeling so smug and satisfied, that I had realized it had also cracked my windshield. Probably the most humiliated I had ever felt was when I had to call my parents after that trying to come up with a good explanation for what had happened. I imagine this conversation in Keep Driving is sort of like that, except if I were also hundreds of miles away and stranded in the middle of nowhere.
But this is what is so great about Keep Driving to me, so much of this game feels just like those nights. Making stupid mistakes behind the wheel surrounded by friends and strangers alike, technically free to go wherever we please but still somehow totally trapped by the reality of the world: money, gas, stress and illness, my relationship to my parents, so on and so on. In another run, I drive and listen to the quiet ambiance of the wind, enjoying the moment until a loud gang of bikers end up on the highway next to me, or I get stuck in traffic, or until this kid I just met in my backseat tells me to put the radio on. There is a real mundane beauty to the world, sometimes interrupted by the equally mundane frustrations, annoyances, and reminders of my real mundane problems. I daydream behind the wheel, and text appears in the clouds: “I gotta call my parents soon, and not only when I need help.” I resolve to do it tomorrow. The text reads: “Sure you will.”
On the road in Keep Driving, there’s always a certain emotional space between me and everybody I meet. I don’t even get the names for most characters who get in my car, they’re all named things like “the kid” and “the girl” and “the idiot.” Seems like pretty much everybody I meet on the road is unemployed. It makes sense given the circumstance: the only people I talk to are people who get into strangers cars and live there for several days, going in a pretty much random direction. Still, they’re good for idle chat. The kid might say something like, “I have to peeeee.” The songwriter might say something like, “better loved and lost than never loved at all, right?” The idiot might say something like, “did you know that the oldest discovered flower is 125 million years old?” Over the course of our road trip, I’ll finish their little side quests and get a fuller picture of their character, but it’s never really complete. There is always a distance they keep me at, and there’s always more distance to drive.
Instead of telling a big story, Keep Driving instead wants us to see the way this interplay of systems and aesthetics creates a nostalgic and melancholic tone. it wants us to find pieces of other people’s stories, to spend time with them and spend time with the world of the game. It wants us to get status effects like “sad,” “tired,” and “dirty,” and make from that what story we will. At the beginning of the game in my third run, one of the backgrounds I could choose from was “In Mourning,” which means that whenever I get the “sad” status effect I also get the “satisfied” status effect. There is a certain Vibe that they’re clearly going for here. A large part of that vibe is the music, which is crucial to the game’s function. Throughout the game I can find or purchase CDs from strangers and stores, and each one unlocks more songs for the soundtrack. The music is almost entirely diegetic, only playing when I decide to put music on in the car, and it featured by all real indie bands mostly from Sweden. It’s genuinely very good, and I especially recommend seeking out CDs for the bands Fucking Werewolf Asso, Holy Now, and The Honeydrips. This game genuinely put me onto them. With these CDs, we can put together little 6 to 8 track playlists and listen to them on the road. I wish the game had committed to making us listen to an album all the way through like you would’ve had to with a CD on a car stereo, but what’s a road trip without a playlist?
One CD, for the song “Dandelion” by Dorena, is given to me by the idiot. The idiot is a little bit spaced out, and my characters first impression of him says something about how he’s not all there. When I pick the idiot up, he asks that I bring him along so he can go visit his sister, and gives me a location to drive to. This was my first quest. Along the way, he gathers flowers into bouquets, talks about the majesty of life and of nature, spaces out. His skills aren’t incredibly useful, and his OCD skill which causes him to organize threats during random encounters into different orders honestly makes things more difficult than anything. Actually getting to the place he’s been guiding me, I find that he’s brought me to visit a graveyard. He plays this song, Dandelion, on a big radio by his side, saying that him and his sister always used to listen to this together. Dandelion is an 8 minute long melodic track full of melancholic and gentle joy, with a twinkly echoing guitar that reminds me of certain midwest emo stuff and a droning and uplifting synth melody that climbs and repeats and climbs again, over and over. He gives the CD to me as thanks for bringing him here. Eventually, he’ll give me a flower to keep on my dashboard, too. Then he gets back in the car with me and we go back on the road, back to dodging potholes and getting stuck behind birds and listening to the drone of the engines in traffic. Spend enough time with him, and my impression of him changes; the text on his character sheet will eventually read:
“Some shitheads called him an idiot when we stopped for gas as he picked another bouquet from the side of the road. He said ‘beauty will save the world and the world is beautiful’. I didn’t understand, but smiled all the same.”
A couple hours into my first run of the game, I ended up at the first big city I had seen. I spent a long time here: picking up part time jobs for money to keep me going, getting too drunk as a bartender for a night and having to sleep it off, wandering in alleys looking for anything useful in the garbage. What brought me here, though, is a letter from my grandmother. It says she’s dying, and she wants to pass on her inheritance to me. I find her, and she tells me about an old cabin she used to live in, which now belongs to me. She tells me to go there, to live there, and to give the land love. So I go turn the car around and go back the way I came, to a little shack near my hometown.
In the real world, I live in the city now, and I don’t drive anymore. Eventually, my car broke down and I just never fixed it. It died on the road one day while I was waiting for a red light to turn green. I just tried to put some pressure on the gas and realized the engine had stopped completely. Before I knew it it was gone. In a sense, it was probably already dead when I started it that day, the engine sputtering awake for the last time. I got it towed off the road and brought to my apartment. It’s changed hands a couple times since then, but today, it’s still there, getting worse. Rabbits run and take shelter under the car as people walk by, and no doubt creatures have made a home in the long dead engine. I’ve been meaning to sell it for parts for ages now, but I just never got around to it. Now it sits, gathering rust and dust, much to the chagrin of my family who doesn’t understand how I could let something go for so long. I guess I’m just thinking about something else. This is the type of ending found in the real world, and the type of ending found in Keep Driving. It’s not particularly satisfying or conclusive. It’s just life and it keeps going.
The game keeps a log of all my past runs. For my first completed run, the log simply says:
“I was studying. Living with my parents. I ended up getting a bit annoyed by this girl. Helped a little girl reunite with her parents. Befriended a songwriter. But I had to cut my trip short because my grandma died.”
leaving the party 