Latest news with #KeepDriving
Top Gear
28-07-2025
- Automotive
- Top Gear
Keep Driving is a road trip game with boss fights against tractors, and we can't put it down
Gaming Manual CD players, hitchhikers, herds of sheep in the road – it's the most realistic driving sim ever Skip 8 photos in the image carousel and continue reading While most driving games take the obvious route and simulate what it's like to control a vehicle, YCJY Games' Keep Driving instead simulates everything that happens outside of that. We won't bemoan the rigours of Le Mans Ultimate for a second, or the flashy licenses of The Crew Motorfest , but at the same time you've simply got to respect a game that lets you decide what to put in your glovebox. Available on Steam now, the nuts and bolts of Keep Driving are bits of roguelikes, adventure games and RPGs. You're plunged into a wistful pixel art depiction of Noughties America, asked to pick a backstory for your young character, including what their summer job is and how well they get on with their parents, and let loose in a boxy saloon with no particular objective other than maybe – if you feel like it – making it over to a festival a few hundred miles away. Advertisement - Page continues below It does a great job of capturing the slightly terrifying freedom of being a young adult with a car and very little experience of looking after oneself. You could go anywhere. The backbreaking load of life's accumulating responsibilities has yet to find its way onto your shoulders. Time feels infinite, but there's also the lingering sense that it's precious, and that older people view you with envy. How should you spend it? Thankfully Keep Driving doesn't require you to have the answers, or indeed any particular plan. Things have a way of happening to you once you hit the road, from hitchhikers who exchange their mix CDs and snacks for safe passage to boss fight events against herds of sheep and tractors. You might like The precise mechanics of those confrontations are a bit fiddly. They involve matching icons on your dashboard to those on your skills, which hang down from your rear view mirror like air fresheners, and if that sounds a bit abstract, that's only because it absolutely is. Some of the inherent satisfaction of finally working your way past a wilfully slow-moving vehicle is lost in the fight system, but seeing these encounters depicted as boss battles in the first place is inspired stuff. There are a variety of vehicles you can embark on Keep Driving's freeform adventure with, although all but one of them are locked the first time you play. Put the hours in, though, and you can start a new adventure with a lumbering pickup truck, the kind whose suspension forks take a full two seconds to bottom out, and an un-named and only slightly beaten up muscle car. It may not be the most dependable choice for a cross-country, heavy mileage road trip, but that's the nice thing about being a young kid on a summer adventure: you've got license to make those mistakes. Advertisement - Page continues below You've also got numerous ways out of a sticky situation like a breakdown. If you decided that some experience working as a mechanic was in your backstory, you can roll your sleeves up and fix it yourself. If you've got a good relationship with your parents, they'll come and pick you up. Or maybe your hitchhiker friend happens to know their way around an engine bay. The game pays attention to all the decisions you make along the journey, even the ones you don't realise you're making, and then resurfacing them down the road in the next scenario. That makes every journey feel like it's been written by you, and it makes Keep Driving feel immersive and full of agency and anecdotes, in a way that's extremely rare in a driving game. And if that doesn't sell you: you select songs by manually operating a CD player. We were handed a disc by a stranger in a camper van outside a petrol station, slid it into the player and let the early Noughties jangly emo music ring out. How's that for immersive? Thank you for subscribing to our newsletter. Look out for your regular round-up of news, reviews and offers in your inbox. Get all the latest news, reviews and exclusives, direct to your inbox.
The Star
27-07-2025
- Automotive
- The Star
Review: A turn-of-the-millenium road trip in 'Keep Driving'
First buy some stuff – a tent for the festival would be good. — Photos: Y/CJ/Y/dpa BERLIN: Cruising around, good conversations, loud music and some distant destination. Road trips can be wonderful. But they can also be exhausting. PC game Keep Driving manages to capture both aspects. At the beginning, players can choose from several vehicles, each with its own advantages and disadvantages. A pickup truck, for example, has more cargo space for useful items, while a saloon will accommodate more people. Players must use their ability cards to neutralise certain symbols that can cost resources. The selected vehicle is always in the centre of the screen and a dashboard at the bottom shows various information such as how much fuel is left, how much energy the main character has and the car's condition. You have to keep a close eye on these resources. If one runs out, the road trip ends and you have to start again. The main destination is marked on a map: a festival on the other side of an unnamed country, clearly inspired by the US. First you have to buy a ticket and possibly a tent. It's the 2000s, there's a festival in another corner of the country, you're young and set off on a road trip. On the way there are various places that serve as intermediate destinations and offer different opportunities to replenish resources, buy items or improve the car. On the roads in between, there are events that can best be compared to turn-based battles. In these events – which can be potholes or traffic jams – you have to neutralise certain symbols, which can cost resources. This is done with skill cards that you place on the symbols. Which important items still need to go from the shop to the boot? You'll also meet hitchhikers along the way. If you pick them up, they'll not only share entertaining stories and their own goals, but they can also be helpful at events using their own skills. The real feeling in this game comes from the beautiful indie music on the soundtrack. A nice detail: You can choose which songs play using your own playlists. The game also features atmospheric pixel graphics. Keep Driving is available on Steam for around €18/US$18 (RM45 in Malaysia). The game is suitable for players aged 14 and older. – dpa
New York Times
28-02-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
3 Video Games You May Have Missed in February
One of the major video game releases in February had players navigate the chaos of a growing empire, with Civilization VII introducing historical ages to the turn-based strategy series. Another, the fantasy role-playing game Avowed, gave an emperor's envoy incredible power. There were more intimate stories as well, including The Stone of Madness, a tactical-stealth game set in a monastery turned asylum, and Lost Records: Bloom & Rage, whose opening chapter has rebellious grit and an inspiring riot grrrl essence. Here are three other games you may have missed this month: Keep Driving If you're the sort of person who feels nostalgia for picking out CDs from your dashboard visor, making long-distance calls on your Nokia brick phone or scarfing down a slice of pizza while tinny rock music blares into the quiet night, the appeal of a game like Keep Driving is obvious. Set in the fantasized memories of nascent adulthood in the early 2000s, Keep Driving is a fun, low-stakes adventure about hopping in a car and going on a long drive somewhere, or nowhere in particular. Your ostensible task is to make your way to a music festival a few towns over. In order to simulate the hazards you'll encounter along the way, the game cleverly retrofits classic card game mechanics. A virtual deck of cards, each card with its own thematically appropriate skill — 'Drive Fast' uses extra fuel to clear obstacles — will help you make it past slow-moving tractors, flocks of sheep and even distracting rainbows. You'll fight exhaustion and a perpetually depleting gas tank. You'll pick up an assortment of hitchhikers. You might even choose to get drunk and party, crashing your ride and winding up in rehab. All these surprises and disasters are the kinds of experiences that texture and support a rich and interesting life. Although Keep Driving has a profoundly hopeful message, it also captures the raucous plasticity and vivacious drive of youth, reminding us that we all once wound up stranded without gas on the side of an empty road. Urban Myth Dissolution Center Azami Fukurai, the high-strung heroine of this Japanese visual novel, has a problem: She sees ghosts. At least that's what she thinks until she follows up on a Tokyo advertisement and visits the Urban Myth Dissolution Center, where she hopes to find a remedy for her onerous gift. When she meets the director, a cerebral young man in a wheelchair, she learns that the hazy apparitions she sometimes glimpses are not wandering shades but 'vestiges of persons and objects that existed and are retained everywhere.' The director convinces her (using a bit of financial leverage) to join his detective agency, which specializes in matters that fall outside the purview of traditional police work. Azami's investigations enmesh her in the personal lives of those who have been affected by things that seem to defy ordinary explanation — a livestreamer who sees a ghost in a mirror; a woman terrified by a man who creeps around her apartment at night. But what gives this game a special flair is that it's really about the battle against misinformation. Again and again, Azami watches how social media latches on to sensational stories and then amplifies rumors, biases and half-baked theories. I wished the game's episodes involved less backtracking. A little bit of editing could have gone a long way in delivering a punchier experience. But while not all of the game's plot twists are created equal, its skeptical bent mitigates its languors to some extent. While Waiting For those who have been bored, frustrated or even anxious when killing time, the often-charming, sometimes-perplexing While Waiting offers a tantalizing series of wait-based minigames. Here, biding time isn't a chore. That's because the narrative arc of one's life feels true. At the beginning of 100 short experiences, I was born a boy. The birth included a lemming-like line across a bridge before I was dropped through clouds that flowed like water. As a child, I reclined warily, hoping for sleep yet haunted by ghosts. As a soccer goalkeeper, I found a ray gun in the sky to shoot targets. My reward was being hit in the face by the ball. I should have concentrated on the pitch. Each scenario is timed. Although you can just sit and relax with a fidget spinner, the player really should accomplish a few tasks before time is up. When you're hanging out in a cafe watching for a bus, the rain dripping down the window inventively turns into a Space Invaders-style game. During class, you avoid the teacher by unhurriedly crawling on the floor. It's kind of a version of Pac-Man, if you were a slow loris. Likely inspirations for While Waiting include the WarioWare series, but this art is never lurid. A delicate pen-and-ink art style features minimalist yet endearingly convincing facial expressions in a game where you must often decipher an objective as the clock ticks down.
