Keep Driving
A videogame review
Welcome to Something New, a newsletter about the human curation of movies, music, books, games, and everything else worthwhile.
Your soundtrack for reading:
As I scrape away at my online presence and my unhealthy usage of electronic machines, I know I will never remove video gaming from the depths of me. They’ve been there since the beginning.
I hope you can imagine a world in which the first computer generated and interactive image a person ever saw was a hound dog bounding into the brush, shaking a fowl loose. Then, when your untrained hands failed to point and click, the hound turned to face you, and laughed in your face.
Games formed bonds to my grandparents (their Super Nintendo with Super Mario Bros. was a sacred retreat), to my parents (my father dove just as deep as I did — deeper, even — into the first Halo game; my mother was completely uninterested), to my siblings (playing Tetris and Dr. Mario was one of the only level battle fields we would all spar upon), to my student cohort (the launch of online gaming via Xbox Live was how I genuinely entered a social life in high school), and, most importantly, to particular internal parts of myself. I’ve probably spent more time playing competitive videogames than I have doing anything else in my life. For a while, while I should have been studying and fostering real interest in interests, I was practicing build orders and timings in Starcraft 2, or attending LAN parties, or attending pizza party sleepovers that were built around Super Smash Bro’s: Melee.
My life was wrapped around games, and it warped around games. That’s why I’ve had to keep myself away from them.
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I cried when I loaded the store page to buy Keep Driving.
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The games that I have genuinely loved in my life have one (if not many other) thing in common: they care about the details.
The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time was filled with polygonal representations of natural life. Halo had AI aliens muttering to each other and expressing surprise at my presence. Stardew Valley reminded you that repetitive daily tasks could hold the keys to a life well lived, if you picked the right tasks. The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild let you explore and complete the game in any order and direction you wanted to, while letting you just live in its world.
These details don’t require insane graphical output or advanced physics and mechanics. They don’t require knowledge of lore or high-level APM (actions-per-minute). They are really just alternate spaces to exist in, ones that surround you with both sight and sound. Sound, especially, is the key. The images, while beautiful and textured, are trapped in two-dimensions – an unfixable downgrade from reality. Sound, especially experienced through headphones, can surround you. The mind can be tricked like that. And sounds – passive sounds, that trickle in around us every moment – can tell you the real story of these alternate spaces.
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I cried when I got to the start menu of Keep Driving.
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Keep Driving, a game from ____, released on ____, is a simple game: it’s the early 2000’s, you are 20 years old, and you’re heading out on the road. You’ve got a CD player, a couple of useful items from your bedroom, and an old beat-up sedan — until you advance farther, unlocking an old, beat-up pick-up truck and an old, beat-up muscle car. You get in your car, and drive.
That’s it.
You can take whatever road you want across the vast, generalized American landscape. You’ll have to stop for gas. You’ll have to take a couple jobs, or run a couple errands, to make money. You’ll need to repair your car. You could drink a couple beers, though it will impair your abilities.
You can stop for hitch-hikers — they might have some helpful abilities. You can stop and explore a hiking trail, which might contain useful items littered about. You can customize your car, for better performance or for better vibes.
But, as with all roadtrips, you’ll come across some unexpected hardship: police stops, muddy roads, a bee in the car. You’ll get hungry, you’ll get tired, you’ll get sad. Some chocolate, some coffee, and stopping to read a book can fix those for you. There is genuine tension in the game as you try to balance your resources, to just keep driving. I failed my first drive, and had to (literally, within the game) call my dad for help. Luckily, in the start menu, I rated my relationship with my parents very highly.
You drive until you reach your ultimate destination: a music festival on the other side of the… country? Island? The other side of the generic, unnamed land mass that everyone lives on. What could be a better way to end summer? Actually, there are multiple ways: scale a huge mountain, if you can save up enough resources to make it that long in the wilderness; win the “big race” down at the speedway, if your car is built right. Return to an old property that someone in the family might leave to you, a place where you can “grow up”.
There are a size-able handful of end-game scenarios that you get to choose from. When you accomplish one, the game is over. Until, that is, you want to head out on the road again. Pick a new car, keep the old one, try taking a different route this time. The game is built on replay-ability. It looks to be built to take on an expansion at some point, bringing more cars, more characters, more items, more ways to end a summer, who knows?
The soundtrack is varied and wonderfully curated. The pixelated graphics are densely layered and effective. The game is simply built, and runs easily on my fun-of-the-mill laptop. It is a simple pleasure. I was a touch disappointed in the limitations of its gameplay variability — it comes nowhere near its sibling game of Stardew Valley, but replicates wonderfully the repeating joys of Vampire Survivor.
The game checked the only box that I care about these days: it handed me the keys to a vehicle that took me someplace else, someplace with a glowing warmth, and a subtle vibrance. Some place outside reality, and some place within myself.
Maybe I’ll see you out there, on a country road somewhere, driving in a worn-down pick-up. If you run out of gas, or need a new carburetor, you can call me — if you think our friendship level is high enough.
Keep Driving website.
Thank you, as always, for reading. I’ve been “going through it” with my online presenece after Dry January (Brain Rot Edition), but writing on here is one of the best ways I spend my time connected to a device. I hope your devices are serving you, and not pulling from you.
Have you played any games recently, virtual or physical? I’d love to hear about them.
TTFN,
bobby