Earlier this week, Swedish indie developer YCJY Games revealed Keep Driving, its upcoming driving game that imagines a cross-country festival roadtrip in your first car as a side-scrolling management RPG. And it looks gorgeous.
After years of teasing, we're excited to finally reveal our next game: KEEP DRIVINGIt’s an atmospheric management RPG about life on the open road. Customize your car, pick up hitchhikers and drive around.You’re young, it’s the early 2000s, & you have lots of time. Sound on!???? pic.twitter.com/5vaTPJllkJOctober 2, 2024
YCJY has gone heavy on pixel art in past games like Post Void and Sea Salt, but Keep Driving looks like its aesthetic magnum opus. From the customizable retro beaters you'll drive and customize to the early 2000s era backdrops of backroad gas stations and rainy Swedish farmland, Keep Driving is peak pixel art nostalgia. It's almost enough to make me long for my own first car, with all its sudden battery deaths and brake failures. Almost.
While crossing Keep Driving's procedurally-generated roads, you'll be facing its version of turn-based "combat," using the driver skills you've unlocked and whatever snacks, tools, and trinkets you've crammed in your glove compartment to evade speed cameras or navigate sheep flock blockades.
In addition to collecting car cosmetics like decals and dashboard bobbleheads, you'll meet the occasional "misfits, oddballs, and lost souls" hitchhiking along the way. Perhaps you'll serve as a convenient carriage for a runaway bride, or temporary transit for a salaryman who just walked out on his job. Considering you'll have to manage your gas, car condition, and your own energy levels, let's hope their destinations are convenient.
Even Keep Driving's UI has an excellent vibe. Every menu and meter looks like it has a secondhand, analogue, '80s hand-me-down dinginess to it that matches your decades out-of-date ride. If I can imagine how a UI's plastic would feel if I brushed my finger against it, that's a good sign.
Keep Driving doesn't have a release date yet, but it's available for wishlisting on Steam now.
