Keep Driving Review - A Love Letter to Open Road Adventures in a Beautifully Crafted Indie RPG
Hit the open road in Keep Driving, a pixel-art inventory RPG! Manage your car, pick up hitchhikers, and survive the trip to the Way Out East festival. Here’s why it’s a must-play indie in 2025!
Keep Driving
Studio: Y/CJ/Y Games
Publisher: Y/CJ/Y Games
Platforms: Steam
Completion Time: Approximately 3 hours | Multiple endings make it 3-20 hours
Price: $17.99
Genre: Narrative, Inventory Management, RPG, Pixel-Graphic
Hitting the Open Road – A Journey Through Keep Driving
Hello everyone, and welcome to the Good Game Lobby review of Keep Driving, a pixel-graphic inventory management RPG from Y/CJ/Y Games. Let’s load up on snacks, pick up some hitchhikers, and map our way to this review.
YCJY Games – A Small Team, A Huge Achievement
Before we get into the story of Keep Driving, I wanted to speak about YCJY Games, a small studio based in Gothenburg, Sweden. They are a team of two—Josef Martinovsky handling art, animation, and design, and Christopher Andreasson working on programming and design. They reached out to Vile Harment for SFX and Dennis Weiden for pedestrian animation. It looks like they also tapped the assistance of a few Swedish bands from Gothenburg to be a part of the soundtrack, which is phenomenal because I am a sucker for shoegaze Swedish indie bands.
I am always blown away that games this damn good are almost always made by small teams like this, and it's wildly impressive what they have pulled off here.
The Stories You Uncover Along the Way
Okay, let’s get back to Keep Driving and its story.
You have just gotten your license, your first car, a wad of cash to your name, and a goal: to get to the music festival Way Out East—a play on Way Out West—by the end of summer. You set out on the open road, ready to explore. Along the way, you will pick up hitchhikers, work odd jobs for cash, repair your car, and experience introspective moments that impact your mood. The way you respond in these introspections can affect your status, so choose wisely.
You will learn more about yourself, your personal story, and your family ties, as well as the lives of those you pick up along the way, by having conversations. You spend more time driving and playing the game than you do reading, but the brief conversations and letters you receive play a larger role in the narrative—though short, they are impactful.
Gas, Gigs, and Gear – Managing Your Journey
Let's break down the game in terms of how you will manage yourself, your hitchhikers, and your car.
When you start the game, you are asked your name, your relationship with your parents (I recommend choosing “very good relationship,” and I’ll explain why later), your occupation, and what you are bringing with you on the trip. Your occupation determines your starting trait. Mine, Fast Learner, allowed me to start with one skill point and gain another when I read.
Skill Points are used for the main RPG elements, where you essentially battle against slow-moving or even broken-down vehicles, gangs of possums or bikers, and just about anything you can think of on a road trip—like a slow cyclist. These encounters will deplete your fuel, energy, and the car's health. You need to use certain items in your glove box or acquired skills to deal with them, or you can slam on the gas and take the hits directly to push past them.
You can become hot or cold based on the weather, tired, hungry, or even starving from long stretches without a break to eat or sleep. It’s up to you to monitor these stats and ensure you are fed, rested, and equipped with items to handle the weather. If not maintained, these factors can become stressful, making inventory management crucial—especially when choosing the right vehicle.
Speaking of vehicles, you have three options:
A 1970 muscle car with two seats
A 1988 truck with four seats and back-row space
A 1981 sedan (basically a Volvo—you’ll notice a recurring Swedish theme throughout the game), which I chose. It had five seats and a good amount of trunk space, which is essential for inventory.
The gameplay starts off straightforward—keeping your energy and hunger at bay, making sure you're fueled up, and repairing your car. But as you collect more hitchhikers, inventory management becomes more critical. For instance, I picked up a musician, and his guitar case took up almost half of my trunk space. You need to keep headache medicine, beer, and snacks on hand to keep everyone happy and the road trip as smooth as possible.
Pixel-Art Vistas
This game is a visual masterpiece.
Pixel-designed games continue to impress me with the unique styles they introduce. Since you drive from left to right, the backgrounds feature parallax scrolling of cityscapes, large stormy clouds, forests stretching into the distance, and beautifully detailed environments. Small touches, like a Jesus bobblehead that moves as you drive, the animation for your glove compartment, rest stops, car upgrades, decals, stickers, and even the act of buying gas, all contribute to the game's immersive feel.
The dashboard sits at the bottom of the screen, showing your energy, status, cash on hand, brake and gas pedals, a digital display, glove compartment, car health, and fuel level. It’s designed to feel like a real car dashboard, keeping everything you need within reach while allowing most of the screen space to focus on the beautifully detailed environments.
Menus, the CD player, and inventory screens are all meticulously designed to fit in as much detail as possible without feeling overwhelming. I especially love the stores and restaurants, where side trips are set up on bulletin boards. The attention to detail in Keep Driving is incredible, and it pays off.
A Perfect Road Trip Vibe
The way you open your glove compartment, trunk, manage your inventory, repair the car, and fill up the gas tank—all of these actions feature perfect sound samples that enhance the immersion. But the music is where Keep Driving truly shines.
WESTKUST starts off the games soundtrack and sets a perfect tone check out ‘Another Day’:
The developers collaborated with multiple bands and artists to create the soundtrack, which you listen to while driving. The best way I can describe the vibe is The Radio Dept.—a staple of Southern Swedish indie rock, dreampop, and shoegaze. My favorite band in the game was Crystal Boys, though every band featured stands out.
You unlock more CDs as you journey east, each one offering a different take on the shoegaze/dreampop soundscape. Gothenburg is truly a special place for Swedish music.
Here’s one of the songs from the game that is a brilliant 8-minute journey by Dorena—enjoy!
The team also made a playlist of some of the music featured in the game here:
Why Keep Driving is Worth the Ride
In my mid-20s, my cousin called to let me know she had tickets for Lollapalooza in Chicago. The issue? I lived in New Jersey at the time and was broke. I turned to one of my best friends and asked if he was free that weekend. We used a website to estimate gas and hotel costs, scrounged up all the cast we had, loaded up on snacks and weed, and hit the road. It was an 18-hour drive and an experience to remember. This was special to me because At The Drive-In was on their reunion tour, it was my first time seeing Frank Ocean live, I had my first-ever lobster corndog, and I smoked way too much weed—but the entire trip is something I’ll never forget.
I felt all of that nostalgia while planning my road trip in Keep Driving. Making my way to the festival, managing inventory, talking to people, and sharing experiences along the way—it perfectly captures the natural flow of a road trip across the U.S. The game made me miss hitting the open road.
It took me 2 ½ hours to complete the main game and road trip I had planned, but I didn’t do any side trips or jobs. Upon finishing, I saw a book with over nine different endings, each with a title hinting at other possibilities, like Jail, for instance.
With multiple endings, side trips to take, and tons of CDs and bands to discover while chatting with interesting characters, it’s worth the $17.99 price tag. Hell, a CD in 2000 cost about $20—why not pick up Keep Driving and experience both an incredible game and a stellar soundtrack?
Keep Driving is a must-play for me and one of my favorite games added to my Best of 2025 list.
Thank you to Future Friends for the review key.
I'm sooo excited to try this game eventually! It looks so charming.
This is a lovely looking game. Nice review.