Video Game / Keep Driving

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Keep Driving is an "atmospheric management RPG" developed and published by YCJY Games and released on February 6, 2025.

You play as a young person taking a road trip to a festival with their friends on the other side of the country. Along the way, you must manage your health, your car, and other resources, face challenging situations on the road, and encounter several different people during your journey. Will you be able to make it to the festival?

Keep Driving displays examples of the following tropes:

• A Boy and His X: A Punk and his Dog, who both need their own seat in the car should the Driver pick them up. While initially the Dog is dead weight, the Driver spending enough time befriending her eventually opens up the Dog's own skill pool. When brought to his destination, the Punk bails and leaves the Dog behind with someone he feels could take better care of her: The Driver.
• Aw, Look! They Really Do Love Each Other: Implied if you set the Driver's relationship with their parents at it's lowest value, as you can still pick Mom's care package as your starting kit, and even thought the odds are low, their parents can still come to help them out in case you get in trouble on the road.
• Badasses Wear Bandanas: The Driver wears a blue one.
• Beginner's Luck: Seems to be simulated by the extraordinarily useful "Have A Go" skill, which can handle any kind of threat and will always give you an extra turn for a relatively measly 1 Energy cost. It will almost inevitably carry you through the early game, before you gain other skills. Fittingly, other using it 30 times, you will get the "Experienced" trait, which presumably indicates you not longer qualify for this trope and therefore places a limit on the previously infinitely spammable "Have A Go".
• The Big Race: The Race ending involves the Driver being invited to a race taking place on the south west portion of the map, and winning said race unlocks the Racer background.
• Boss Subtitles: Every encounter faced while driving shows the name of the encounter passing along the road as the Driver comes up to them. Most of these are fairly mundane, such as a tractor obstructing your path or speed cameras on the road.
• Character Customization:
  • You can change your Driver's name, determine what kind of relationship they have with their parents, and select from a number of different backgrounds and starting kits. For instance, your character might be a part-time mechanic, might not have any job at all, or be in the middle of mourning some personal tragedy.
  • You can also unlock a wide variety of skills to use during encounters, along with various personality traits based on your actions and experiences during a given run.
• Cool Car: You can customize your car in whatever way you see fit with paint jobs, decals, and upgrades. As long as you have the money, you're allowed to make your own dream car.
• Cute Kitten: The Songwriter has a cute orange cat with him, and he may remark how he’s purring loudly. There’s also a quest where you find someone’s missing cat. The name varies between playthroughs but it’s always a cute black and white cat.
• Descent into Addiction: The Driver can be played this way, with one route culminating in you checking into a rehab clinic. This unlocks the relevant background.
• Distant Finale: The Omega Ending takes place after the Driver has become old enough to have a grandchild.
• Drunk Driver: While you can drive drunk, doing so is a very bad idea, as it will give you a time limit when choosing what to do during encounters, and will also randomly add extra threats. While the Hurricane does give you bonuses for drunk driving, it's not really worth it.
• Duct Tape for Everything: Duct Tape is a common item you can buy in stores, which eliminates two durability threats when used.
• Five-Finger Discount: After fully leveling up, the Hurricane will gain the ability to steal a single small item from any shop you visit.
• Foreshadowing: The pill bottles on the main menu and the fact that playthroughs sometimes begin with a seemingly random mention of nurses and medicines as you attempt to remember the trip all hint at the Framing Device being an elderly person remembering road trips from their youth.
• Free-Range Children: Deconstructed with The Kid, who was packed off on her own to visit her father at all of six years old and gets completely lost.
• Funny Background Event: At night, the hitchhikers wear sleep masks when asleep, including the Punk’s dog.
• Gray Rain of Depression: The Downer starting trait, which is tied to the In Mourning background and gives The Driver the satisfied status every time they're sad, also makes it rain more often.
• Hard-Drinking Party Girl: The Hurricane, whose personal quest and several skills require you to drive under the influence, and whose ending has you and her party the summer away in a friend's cabin.
• Hidden Depths: The Punk, with his green mohawk, piercings, and ripped, studded jacket, seems at first glance like your run of the mill delinquent. He's actually a staunch (and, implicitly, vocal) vegan, reads philosophy, disapproves of driving under the influence, and so dearly loves his dog that he will refuse to ride without it.
• Idiosyncratic Difficulty Levels: Relations with parents effectively act as a difficulty setting, as they affect your chances of getting a second chance by calling them after your car runs out of fuel or breaks down.
• Life Meter: Three actually. Your Energy and Durability are both represented by a green and blue bar respectively, and Fuel is represented by a red gauge, which unlike the other two drain passively as you drive regardless of random ecounters.
• Magikarp Power: The Punk's Dog initially just occupies one of your seats and does nothing as a downside of the Punk. If you fully level up the Punk, however, his Dog will then be able to gain experience, learning a few skills that remove a single threat of a specific type.
• Missing Child: The Kid, a six-year-old who took the wrong bus while travelling to stay with her dad and gets thoroughly lost, and now needs the Driver to help reunite her with her parents.
• Multiple Endings: While your original goal is to buy a ticket and make it to the music festival venue in time, certain other questlines can also serve as the endgame for a given run. If you're not careful, you can also wind up getting arrested.
• New Game Plus: Each playthrough offers the potential to unlock new Backgrounds, Starting Gear, and a couple different options for cars, as well as lots and lots of music.
• Nice Day, Deadly Night: In a more benign variant than usual, driving at night will result in your hitchhikers falling asleep, preventing you from using their skills. As such, unless you really need to keep driving, it's best to go to sleep yourself in order to skip the night.
• Non-Standard Game Over: Should you fail a police stop encounter while having contraband in your trunk or reaching level 3 with The Convict, you'll gain a special ending where you get imprisoned. The same will occur if you provoke the cop into chasing you by pressing the gas pedal during a stop, then fail the chase, regardless of whether you owned anything illegal.
• Omega Ending: Collecting all of the endings unlocks the ability to access this by choosing to Stand Up in the main menu, revealing that the entire game has been an elderly person's recollection of their past travels before giving away their road trip picture album to their grandchild.
• Only Known by Their Nickname: The various hitchhikers you can pick up are referred to only as "The [Descriptive Term]", such as The Mechanic, The Girl, or The Idiot. The player character's default name in character creation is also set as The Driver.
• Parent ex Machina: If you find yourself stranded on the road with no ways to refill your fuel or durability, or without the money needed to call a tow truck, you can call your parents and ask them to bail you out as a last resort. Your parents will refill all your resources to max and give you 200 cash. They're not guaranteed to help you however, and if you're unlucky enough they will not come to your aid, ending the game. The likelihood of your parents rescuing you depends on what number you set your relations with them at the start, a higher relationship means it's more likely for them to help you.
• Resources Management Gameplay: The core of the gameplay has you facing off against several road hazards and situations, which can reduce several of your core resources: money, energy, fuel, and car durability, with you using your abilities to reduce possible costs to these. Energy can be replenished by sleeping while in a town; car durability can be replenished by paying for repairs in a garage; fuel can be regained at gas stations; and money can be earned by doing jobs. Running out of fuel or durability leads to your car breaking down and, unless you can get help, is a Game Over.
• Resting Recovery: If you're not driving, you can go to sleep, recovering energy and refreshing all skills with limited uses. However, if you can't pay for accommodations, then you'll have to sleep in the car, causing you to lose durability and suffer from cold.
• Road Trip Plot: The main plot covers the Driver taking a road trip across a country to meet their friends at a festival.
• Runaway Bride: One hitchhiker has run away from her wedding; she's still wearing her bridal gown when you potentially pick her up.
• Smoking Is Cool: Cigarettes are available at convenience stores and eliminate one energy threat at a time, they are fairly inexpensive and can be used many more times that other consumables. The Driver themselves is also depicted smoking on the start screen and on promotional artwork.
• Shoot Out the Lock: If you have a gun, it allows you to unlock gates while exploring cities.
• Shout-Out: One of the dashboard figurines you can buy is Jacket from Hotline Miami, the figurine's description even is "Do you like hurting other people?".
• Shows Damage: The car will look more worse for wear as it's durability lowers, and will look increasingly held together with duck tape. The Driver themselves will get drowsy if he's low enough on energy.
• Traveling Salesman: The Suit. He asks The Driver to take him to the nearest town with an employment office, only for him to ask them if they can keep traveling with them. His skills mostly target cash targets and he comes off as a lazy, wanna-be hussler.
• Turn of the Millennium: The intro explicitly states that the game takes place in the early 2000s, with several people wearing the fashion trends of the era.
• Unexpectedly Realistic Gameplay: Pressing on the gas pedal will normally allow you to escape an encounter cleanly and easily, although you'll take damage from every threat present. However, if you do the same when being stopped by the police, you'll be immediately pulled into another encounter where you're being chased by the cops.
• Unlockable Content: You can unlock more music for the CD player by buying music disks from thrift stores, but can also be unlocked from random encounters or achieving endings.
• Video Game Cruelty Potential: You can abandon the Kid while she's out of the car while peeing by pressing on the gas pedal during the event. Doing so gains you the Heartless trait which makes the happy status last half as long.
• What the Hell, Hero?: Several of the hitchhikers call you out if you decide to drink and drive. The Kid also mopes so well if the player engages in illicit substances that the player gets hit with the Sad status effect.
• Year X: The specific year in which the game takes place is never stated, and the photos present on the endings album all say 200X.