“A free-wheeling RPG road trip that pushes all the right buttons,” was Brendy’s verdict on Keep Driving this February. I am thankful for Brendy for many things in life, but seldom more so than today, for he has supplied me with an easy opening segue: there are even more of those buttons to push now, for Keep Driving has been updated with gamepad support.
The update also introduces a casino minigame for the El Cobra location, and a new location in the form of Junkyards, where you will presumably find leftover bits for your car. Wash that down with some borderless fullscreen, campsite sidestops where you can rest for free, new decals, and the ability to refuel jerrycans at gas stations. Witness it all in motion in the below celebratory trailer.
Watch on YouTube
I was happy that Brendy got to review Keep Driving, because Brendy is often tasked with reviewing car games that are cruel to him – car games in which the car is secretly an incontinent cougar that pisses all over your dreams, even as you strive to render it roadworthy. Keep Driving, by contrast, is “a hypnotically involving game of picking up hitchhikers and battling tailgaters, a pixel art drivealong with tactile, chunky buttons and perfectly suited sound effects, as much fuelled by nostalgia as it is by gasoline”. My goodness, that sounds almost uplifting. Barely any pissy cougars at all!
In a post on Steam, developers YCYJ Games assert that the gamepad support scrubs up well on Steam Deck, but stress that “if you play on Steam deck, make sure to not lock your FPS for best possible performance”. This is the first of four planned updates for 2025: there’s a “smaller content update” coming in May, some additional new bits and localisation features in late summer, and console support by winter.
The roadmap post concludes with some reminiscences on “how important it is to appreciate the fleeting beauty of the world, and the fleeting beauty people you stumble upon, and the fleeting beauty of now”. Which is both on-brand and atypically poignant for a roadmap post. Imagine if every Call Of Duty changelog ended by telling the player to touch grass and remember the taste of strawberries.
