Keep Driving

Road 96 is the comparison everyone reaches for, and it is the wrong one. That game used the highway as a delivery system for scripted conversations. Keep Driving uses it as a resource sheet you are slowly losing control of, and as someone who reads tooltips for fun, that difference is the entire review. YCJY's pixel-art road trip, released in February 2025, presents itself as a lo-fi hangout about a summer you only half remember. Then it hands you a fuel gauge, a stamina bar, a car assembled out of optimism and duct tape, and a route map where every turn is a commitment you cannot walk back. Cozy is the surface texture. Underneath it is arithmetic, and the arithmetic does not care about your vibe. The core loop is a road trip broken into runs. You pick a destination, plot a path through towns and long stretches of highway, and then survive the drive. Hazards are not cutscenes here. Traffic jams, potholes, rain, hangovers, and your own wandering attention all resolve as turn-based encounters where each obstacle has a health value and each of your skills is a move with a cost. Fuel, energy, and car condition are the real life bars, and they drain at the same time. Route planning is where it gets genuinely tense: the scenic detour that restores your nerves is also the one that leaves you three gas stations from anywhere, and vehicle repair eats the money you were going to spend on fuel. Hitchhikers ride along as companions with their own abilities, which is the closest this gets to party composition. Choosing the right passenger for the road ahead is a real decision, not flavor text. On the writing side, this is slice of life rather than saga, and I want to set expectations honestly. Nobody delivers a monologue that will live in your head for a decade. What you get instead is a coming of age story assembled out of small talk: junk in the glovebox, roadside conversations that trail off, passengers who tell you one true thing and then get out at the next town. It works because it is specific and understated, and because the mechanics carry the theme better than the dialogue does. Running dry at 2am with someone asleep in the back seat does more emotional work than any paragraph about freedom could. On repeat runs, though, you start seeing the seams. Encounter text recurs, and the choices you make inside events shape your resources far more than they shape any person. If you arrive from branching CRPGs expecting decisions to fork the story, recalibrate now. The other rough edges are worth naming. The encounter system is thinner than it first appears, and by the back half of a long trip you are mostly re-running the same three efficient answers to the same four problems. Randomness can hand one run a fair, readable drive and hand the next a cascade of breakdowns that ends things through no fault of your planning, which stings in a game that otherwise rewards careful route math. The difficulty curve is also front-loaded: the early scramble, when you are broke and the car is a rumor, is far more interesting than the stretch where you have cash, working parts, and a stocked glovebox. This is a game with a strong opening act and gentle diminishing returns after it. Play it if you like resource-management puzzles wearing soft clothes, if run-based structure in a nostalgic setting appeals more than another dungeon, or if you want something RPG-adjacent you can start and finish in an evening without a wiki open. Skip it if you need character arcs with real payoff, build variety that keeps reinventing itself past hour 40, or combat with long-term progression to chew on. I came away fond of it for exactly what it is: a small, sharply designed game about the gap between the trip you planned and the one you actually took.

Monika · Scout Team

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