I’ve never learnt to drive, and while I’ve always told myself it’s impractical – unnecessary, expensive, potentially dangerous for someone with undiagnosed but, I suspect, incredibly likely dyspraxia – I’m not sure it’ll ever stop being one of those quiet regrets; the ambient type that don’t really bubble to the surface much unless I’m watching a Noah Gervais road trip video, but just float there and make my mood like, 1.5% worse at all times.
So maybe it’s just me, but there’s a sense of intense freedom and adventure to Keep Driving’s Steam demo that belies its prosaic, tractor-tailing subject matter. The opening minutes are oddly silent, until Westkust’s Swirl blasts out from your radio as soon as you drive off toward your first destination – your mate’s house, to hang out and play console games. It comes on strong and sweet; a rush of wind through an open window on a warm morning.
There’s a lot of creative UI loveliness going on, and between its vivid intricacies, the low-stakes scenario, and the music, it all makes even the most mundane encounter or inconvenience take on a sort of mythical, life-altering importance. In other words, it feels like being a teenager. It’s actually really nice to be told sometimes that yes, you are the protagonist of reality and yes, the tractor you’re stuck behind represents a Bildungsroman chapter’s worth of personal growth.
In game terms, what it actually represents is slightly stiff and drawn-out RPG combat where you use skills and items to defang differently flavoured threats – although there does feel like real potential for it to evolve later. Plus, to be fair, much turn-based combat consists of attacking, defending, and maybe one or two skills for the first few hours, anyway. ‘Threat’ icons will target one of several resources – gas, energy, cash, and your car’s health – and you’ll use abilities and items you’ve stuffed in your glovebox to take them out before they affect you.
What’s interesting here, and I think deliberate, is the way it frames your ability to overcome these challenges through your own openness and curiosity. Picking up hitchhikers means going out of your way, and their possessions taking up trunk space you could be using for precious supplies. But hitchhikers can also lend their skills to help you during these encounters. I suppose you could see this as an expression of either the silent spirit of the road rewarding you for being a dependable dude, or just calculatedly trying to shove as many people in the back as you can to gain numerical advantage. Either way, even when I’m not especially jazzed with the translation of combat, the way the context around these encounters evokes that FTL sensation of personal, evolving, unpredictable stories is captured well.
There was a bit of a fun “strange pivot after Post Void” sentiment floating around on the reveal, but there’s a throughline here, I think. It’s the same sort of nostalgic love letter to the thumb blistering, caffeinated all-nighter of older games – you’re just inhabiting the person on the other side of the screen now. An interesting thought experiment I occasionally remember to think about while playing something: is what I’m watching intended to depict a reality, or a performance? Am I watching a stage play or folk tale or memory depicting these events, or is this how they’re supposed to have occurred? Basically: how many layers of fiction deep does this thing go?
Keep Driving makes me feel too present to be a memory, and but it’s so idealised that it almost has to be. It’s the clouds, I think. That’s a remembered skyline if I ever saw one. It doesn’t all hit, but the parts that do hit like, well, a ten tonne tractor. I don’t think tractors come that big but, please, I’m being wistful. About tractors.