Keep Driving PS5 review – beware of hitchhikers

Keep Driving – it’s not exactly Gran Turismo (YCJY Games) A roguelite road trip where your relationship with your parents may lead to the game over screen is one of the most endearingly oddball indie games of the year. There are times in life when less is more. If you’ve seen one too many expensively produced, but oddly peril free, CGI movie chase sequence or feel as though every single supermarket ready meal somehow manages to be simultaneously both too sweet and too salty, there’s a moment when you yearn for something simpler and more pared back. Something that’s not made to be hyper-stimulating and is happy to offer a more modest level of satisfaction. If you’ve been feeling like that lately, Keep Driving might just be the tonic you’re searching for. It’s a roguelite roadtrip simulator that casts you as a late teenager in the early 2000s with your first car, time on your hands, and the open road stretching out in front of you. It’s a time just before the advent of smartphones, so you’ve got a paper road atlas to guide you, some wonderfully evocative grunge rock on the stereo, and, thanks to your parents, a full tank of petrol. Presented in parallax scrolling 2D, your journey through the game’s pixel art countryside takes place in a succession of turn-based encounters that start with selecting your destination on the map, before taking to the motorways and A-roads. There you’ll find all sorts of challenges coming your way, each of which needs to be dealt with using whatever limited resources you have available. Naturally one of those problems is petrol, your car’s fuel gauge slowly ticking down as you clock up the miles, or in response to certain threats you meet along the way. As you can imagine, the best way to manage that is topping up your tank in towns or at rest stops, as well as making sure you’ve got a jerry can or two in the boot for emergencies. Whether or not you have room to do that depends on the car you’re driving. Setting out, you choose one of three vehicles. A battered old 80s Volvo acts as the middle option, providing decent boot space and plenty of seating for hitchhikers – which is a subject we’ll return to shortly. Alternatively, you can plump for a pick-up truck, which has massive storage but only three seats, or a 70s muscle car, which doesn’t have much room but does offer a roaring engine. Expert, exclusive gaming analysis Sign up to the GameCentral newsletter for a unique take on the week in gaming, alongside the latest reviews and more. Delivered to your inbox every Saturday morning. You also have to rate how solid your character’s relationship is with their parents, on a scale from one to five. That slightly tweaks the difficulty level, because they act as your back-up of last resort. A call home either rescues you from total disaster – with a full tank of petrol, some cash in your wallet, and your car’s mechanical durability restored – or, if they turn you down, it’s instant game over. Challenges arrive in many forms, from tailgaters and insect swarms, to broken down cars and getting stuck behind tractors, but all are solved by applying your character’s skills, and the items you store in your glove compartment. Each event you encounter threatens to reduce your car’s fuel and durability, or your character’s cash and energy level. You can top up the latter with a quick roadside snooze but money is harder to come by. Parrying those hazards means using skills. They each deal with one or more threats and come with a limited number of uses, which can be reset with a really long sleep. Matching the pattern of solutions from your skills and stored items to the most pressing threats helps you minimise the damage they do, thus prolonging your trip. Depending on their content, these incidents can also introduce status effects, both positive and negative, the interplay of all these factors making each foray onto the open road feel unique. What really sells it though, is your ability to stop for hitchhikers. They come in all sorts of different varieties, and each has their own intended destination and set of skills that you can use alongside your own to get past tricky obstacles on your journey. You can never fit everything you want (YCJY Games) The Idiot spouts half-baked home brew philosophy, but sometimes rearranges incoming threats, which can be a pain when you’ve already got a plan in mind. The Kid is just eight-years-old and continually needs to stop for lavatory breaks, while the Hurricane’s a free spirit who brings her own copious supply of pot, but whose habits can prove risky to your safety. While they each bring new options to the mechanics of events, it’s their distinct personalities that add the most to the game. Even though there’s no voice acting, and each hitcher is really just a small, pixellated portrait, their text-only conversations somehow spring to life in your imagination. A bit like reading a book rather than watching a film, those few lines of dialogue, and the tenor of their reactions let your mind fill in the blanks. It’s remarkably effective. Lightly reminiscent of Roadwarden’s old school text adventuring, which used similarly sparse prose to conjure up a richly textured world full of ripe characters, Keep Driving manages to convey its warmth and humanity with the lightest of touches. It helps propel you past events’ somewhat repetitive feel, and the fact that you get through each of them in more or less the same way. There are upgrades you can install in your car, side jobs to take on for extra cash, moments of introspection on the open road, and the ever present indie soundtrack, with new music acquired during certain roadside happenings. Each run may only last two or three hours, but it’ll take you a lot longer than that to meet its full cast of hitchhikers, let alone to get the hang of all the many peculiar side activities you stumble across. As the pre-Christmas video game hype train rumbles into view, it would be easy to miss a game like Keep Driving, and that would be a pity (although it was initally on PC last year). Its encounters may eventually start to feel a little humdrum, but the tension they create is not, especially with a back seat full of weirdos whose skills you can exploit whilst doing your best to survive their dangerous quirks. If you’re in the mood for something a little different, look no further. Keep Driving PS5 review summary In Short: An enjoyable low-tech road trip simulator, with an excellent script and soundtrack, whose lightly sketched but surprisingly fun characters make up for slightly simplistic gameplay mechanics. Pros: Great looking pixel art that really brings the open road to life, amusing hitchhiker character vignettes, and a huge range of modifiers and skills that make each run feel different. Cons: Road events eventually start to feel repetitive and all of them are resolved with the same system of pattern matching. Hitchhikers’ more extreme foibles can get annoying. Score: 7/10 Formats: PlayStation 5 (reviewed), Nintendo Switch, Xbox Series X/S, and PCPrice: £15.00Publisher: YCJY GamesDeveloper: YCJY GamesRelease Date: 28th September 2026Age Rating: 18 The police are not necessarily your biggest worry (YCJY Games) Email gamecentral@metro.co.uk, leave a comment below, follow us on Twitter. To submit Inbox letters and Reader’s Features more easily, without the need to send an email, just use our Submit Stuff page here. For more stories like this, check our Gaming page. 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