Keep Driving PC Review 7.5/10 "The Crazy Gas Fuelled Adventures Of A Sedan!" 🚗 @YCJYgames #IndieGame #GameDev

Keep Driving from YCJY Games is a wonderful turn-based RPG that combines elements of road trips and roguelike mechanics, all wrapped up in a beautiful pixel art package of nostalgia and great music.

You play as a young driver who has just bought their first car around the early 2000s, and your main goal is to meet up with your friend at a music festival on the other side of the country within four weeks. Interestingly, the game features a procedurally generated world with various routes, 'shopping' stops and random encounters along the way.The game focuses on maintaining your car, managing your resources, and picking up hitchhikers to add to your RPG party. You also face various road trip-related challenges, such as flat tires, bad weather, loan sharks, and other road-related obstacles, such as immovable sheep, birds, and rocks! The combat system is a cool card-based system, where you use skills on your cards to match and eliminate hostile icons that represent imminent and incoming road-related challenges.

Being a procedurally generated world, each playthrough offers a different experience, with new map routes and random encounters delivered to players on each run.

The hitchhiker system is a great idea, well implemented, as you have the opportunity to pick up temporary hitchhiker party members with distinct personalities and skills who will chat with you about their lives while you travel. Hitchhikers also add their personal cards to your battle deck when fighting those road-related challenges.

Buffs can come in the form of items that you purchase from the many different types of shops you'll stumble across as you traverse the map. These buffs can be things like chewing gum, tape, food items, drinks, etc., that will get you out of a tricky spot as you battle the need to manage resources and cash along your merry way.

You'll also have the opportunity to find items either by the roadside or during certain parts of the journey where you can get out of your car and explore in a First Person Dungeon Crawler-style mini-game, which is really cool.

Some items can be used to modify your car, such as adding an extra comfy seat to boost your hitchhiker's XP, or maybe you might want to add a flag to your bonnet that will get you a discount in the shops. There are some really fun mods that can change up the game and also make for a real reason to try multiple playthroughs.

When I first became aware of Keep Driving, it was that wonderful pixel art style that drew me in. Beyond that, I would have to say that learning the combat system and discovering the various events as you make your way across the map really kept me engrossed in what was going to happen next. What I also found was that the soundtrack grabbed me immediately, with the interactive CD player display from the era really bringing back those memories of slotting in your favourite CD and cranking it up to MAX VOLUME while you drove in your very own car. The freedom of those days really came back to me as I recalled driving my VW Polo to new and exciting places (other than just up to Little Chef and back).

I think the thing that sticks for me is that it truly captures the carefree essence of a road trip and the understanding that it's not really about the destination; it's 100% about the journey.

In this case, when you eventually reach the music festival, the ending knits together your choices and the relationships you've built with the hitchhikers and other characters you met on the road, providing multiple endings based on those encounters.

SUMMARY
This is a delightful game that I am glad I jumped into with my arms wide open and my passenger door ajar. If you want to experience something special in the card-based RPG world, then this is the video game for you, my friends.

Right, I'm off to take part in a dirt rally in Innes before I search the nearby footpaths for hydraulic upgrades.

7.5/10

🆒COOL🆒

.-----.-.___ '-O---O--' __ __ __ __ __