I love driving. I love the physical act – controlling this large, sophisticated machine as if it were an extension of me. But I also love the poetry and adventure of long-distance travel – the freedom, the independence, the gradually changing landscape, the feeling of limitless possibilities.
Video games are fantastic at capturing the first of these things, in Gran Turismo and countless other racing games. Sometimes they try to do both things at the same time. Open world driving games like Forza Horizon deliver a condensed and heightened dose of the joys of the road trip, while the Truck Simulator series offers a more everyday, realistic take on it – and Desert bus infamously parodied the boredom associated with the idea of simulating long journeys.
Keep goingan indie game in development by YCJY Games from Sweden (Sea salt, Post invalid) takes a different approach, aiming to capture both the romance and the boredom of long drives while ditching the part where you actually control the vehicle. Instead, it borrows from another video game genre that’s about travel, adventure, and progression: old-school RPGs that focus on the hero’s journey.
In the demo of the game Available nowThe goal is to drive to your friend’s house through a nameless, fictional country that looks vaguely like the America of a thousand road-rip movies to spend a night playing video games. The journey will take four days in the game, but around one to two hours in real life. After packing your suitcase (a Resident Evil-style grid inventory), you select your next stop on a map and hit the road. Then sit back and watch your car eat up miles as the world goes by from right to left.
At every stage of the journey, events occur that threaten to hinder your progress: a slow tractor, potholes or rain puddles, for example. These threaten to devour your three resources: gasoline, the durability of your car and your energy as a driver. There’s an abstract turn-based event system where you use skills and items from the glove compartment to eliminate threats (perhaps because you have something to be thankful for). Oregon Trail), which appear at the bottom of the screen as a series of color-coded icons. Skills like Relax and items like Tape target specific patterns of symbols, so these events have a slight puzzle element to them.
Environmental conditions also affect these events, applying buffs and debuffs. Rain increases gas consumption, while a beautiful forest inspires you and reduces the energy cost of some skills. And you can also pick up hitchhikers who have additional skills but bring their own quirks – a wandering songwriter will be offended if you don’t use his skills; A cool young woman fills your trunk with useless junk. At rest stops you can refuel, purchase items that replenish resources or counteract debuffs, or sacrifice time to take a job and earn much-needed gas money.
Image: YCJY Games
Image: YCJY Games
Image: YCJY Games
Image: YCJY Games
Keep going is deeply nostalgic. Set in the early 2000s, you’re just out of your teens and have bought your first car – maybe a beat-up 1970s muscle car or a boxy 1980s sedan that looks like a car Volvo 200 series. The car has a CD player that plays garage indie rock, and you can fill the trunk with bottles of Coke, guitars, and crates of beer. Abilities are represented by blurry Polaroids held by bulldog clips. Occasionally you will experience moments of self-reflection while driving: My back hurts, I should call my parents, what am I doing with my life? Multiple choice answers to these questions affect status – some of them are bad, some of them are good.
It’s a very specific, powerful vibe that conjures up that uprooted time in life, when driving for three days just to play video games with a friend seems not only doable, but a good use of your time. It reminds me of how, shortly after my 21st birthday, one hazy, aimless summer, I set out in my little red Fiat to visit the houses of some distant friends. The pixel art cars, atmospheric landscapes and boho hitchhikers are easy to see and give the feel of a hip coming-of-age film from the late 90s.
At the moment it’s a bit difficult to get to grips with the abstract game mechanics. Using patience (a skill) and gum (an item) to navigate a difficult road surface is, at least for me, a bigger mental leap than using spells and swords to defeat a monster. But over a few hours Keep going perfectly evokes the precarious freedom of a long car ride when you have no money and all the time in the world. It’s a game about drinking coffee to drive all night, sleeping in the backseat, and holding yourself and your car together with pizza and duct tape. Over the course of the 15-20 hours that the developers promise for the finished article, Keep going could be the perfect video game road trip.
