Keep Driving’s perfectly annoying hitchhikers are a game-design master class

On my second run through Keep Driving — a wonderful, turn-based, pixel-art game about taking long road trips as an aimless youth in the early 2000s — I picked up a hitchhiker called The Hurricane. This young woman was attractive and cool, much cooler than me. But she was also kind of annoying. She kept filling up the precious inventory space in my car’s trunk and the well behind the front seats with useless trash: used toilet rolls, packs of cigarettes with only one smoke left in them, spilled coffee cups. And she really wanted to party, which ended up getting me into terrible trouble.

Before I tell you about that, let me tell you how hitchhikers work in Keep Driving. They have unique skills, which can be used in the turn-based sort-of-combat encounters that occur as you drive — because you’re stuck in traffic, or there’s a bee in the car, or you’re being menaced by a gang of bikers. The hitchhikers also have traits, which can be helpful or not — like The Hurricane’s trash habit. They level up as you drive, acquiring new skills and traits as the trip goes along. And sometimes they give you quests and unlock new possible endings for your road trip.

When The Hurricane reached level 2, she acquired a new trait that allowed me to shoplift small items every time I visited a new store. Bored, she also pleaded with me to take a drink with her while we were driving. As in real life, drink-driving in Keep Driving is a terrible idea. It applies a seasick roll to the screen, makes the combat encounters much harder, and imposes a tight time limit on each turn, so you have no time to consider your best moves.

Still, I was interested to see what would happen — or perhaps the unemployed driver I was role-playing was a bit starstruck by this glamorous, dangerous passenger — so I sunk a beer and gave it a go for one short country-road stage. It was a disaster. I failed horribly at every encounter. When I reached my destination, my car was half destroyed, I was out of gas, and I was out of money to buy gas. It was a real pickle. I had to call my mom for an emergency loan. But The Hurricane said I was cool, and invited me to a party in a cabin in the woods — a new game-ending destination for my current run.

When she reached level 3, The Hurricane acquired a trait called “Demanding,” which applied a permanent, impossible-to-clear Tired debuff to my character, meaning all skills cost more energy to use. I laughed out loud at that one.

With Keep Driving’s hitchhikers, developer YCJY Games (Sea Salt) has delivered a master class in economical characterization and storytelling through game design. Each one is a perfect sketch of a character from a quirky 1990s indie movie: the cool musician, the sullen gambler, the runaway bride, the punk with a dog. They have short, beautifully written bios that evolve as you level up, and beautifully observed pixel portraits that appear in your rearview mirror. But really, the best writing about them is in their skills and especially their traits, which both encapsulate who they are and apply amusingly annoying effects that might nudge your game in interesting new directions.

The Stranger wanted me to take him to a casino all the way on the other side of Keep Driving’s randomized road map, which spans Pacific Northwest forests, Southwestern deserts, mountain country, and verdant coasts. His first skill was useful, so I rolled with the fact that he would “borrow” some of my money to gamble with every time I needed to sleep (necessary to recover energy and skill uses). But when he reached level 2, his bio mentioned that he was perving on every girl he could see and he acquired the “Creep” trait, meaning any female hitchhikers in the car would stop gaining experience. So I kicked him out.

The Mechanic was handy — with him on board, I could apply upgrades to the car without driving to a garage first, his skills were great, and he could effect minor repairs, too. But at level 3, he became annoyed I hadn’t done more work to the car, expressed with a trait that sapped one energy for every empty upgrade slot I had. The Sleeper would just randomly fall asleep at inopportune moments, graying out all his skills, although he did eventually acquire a powerful Snore skill that could be used when he was dozing. The Idiot, a vague, unnerving, savant-like character who wanted to visit his sister’s grave, had wonderfully counterintuitive skills that would apply the “happy” buff if they were used to no effect, or target threats completely randomly. At level 3, he decorated the interior of my car with flowers.

This is the joy of Keep Driving. Carefully designed elements like the hitchhikers, the map, and the buffs and debuffs you encounter on the way work together like mechanical storytelling devices, changing the shape and flavor of each trip you undertake. It’s not about creating a roguelike-style challenge; although there are failure states, the game is mostly as easygoing as its subject matter suggests. It’s a game about taking life as it comes, and taking your time. Each quest or destination comes with a deadline to meet, but you usually have a week or even a month to get there — enough time to stop and take a job for some cash, to sleep in laybys, to get waylaid, and to roll with the random happenstance that will crop up on the way.

Keep Driving’s vibes are immaculate, from the scuzzy indie rock soundtrack to the scrolling, parallax landscapes and the boxy, Volvo-like starting car. Its turn-based “combat” system is, perhaps, overly abstract; it’s a kind of puzzle game that involves matching the patterns of your skills to a row of “threats” that might sap your energy, gas, car durability, or money. It’s absorbing enough, but there’s a big conceptual gap between it and the action being described by the game.

But the wider game design — its web of conditions, resources, rules, goals, and unexpected effects, exemplified by those hitchhikers — is something special. Keep Driving is a funny, pleasantly capricious, and wistful storytelling system that generates playable anecdotes about a joyfully wasted youth. It’s a nostalgic love letter to the open road and to the days when you had more time than money, and more desire than purpose. And it’s about the perplexing, irritating, and hilarious friends you made on the way.

Keep Driving is available now on Windows PC. The game was reviewed on PC using a pre-release download code provided by YCJY Games. Vox Media has affiliate partnerships. These do not influence editorial content, though Vox Media may earn commissions for products purchased via affiliate links. You can find additional information about viraltrendingcontent’s ethics policy here.