The really real driving simulator

Developer/ publisher YCJY Games

Format PC Origin Sweden

Release 2025

Somewhat appropriately, YCYJ’s game about driving for days has had a long journey, beginning way back in 2016. “It sounded like a neat little idea,” explains Christopher Andreasson, one half of the Swedish two-person studio, “and now we’re here in 2024 and it’s still not done.” To be clear, YCYJ has produced several other games in the interim, but Keep Driving has required a lot of redesign and tinkering under the bonnet to become roadworthy. At first it was structured more like The Oregon Trail, with a large number of minigames and different systems but no single focused direction, Andreasson tells us. “It was too complicated for us to make at the time.”

Taking the wheel of the latest model, we now feel like we’re entering Roguelike territory. Yet, while there are similarities, Josef Martinovsky, the other half of YCYJ, tells us that the duo wants to avoid the mischievous difficulty that defines the genre, and the bigger inspiration here is tabletop gaming. “We actually made the game as a card game,” he says, “and then we started looking at it in a different way, more like an RPG.” From there it was a question of translating elements of a road journey into systems more usually associated with fantasy combat, turning your choice of car into your character class, hitchhikers into party members, and snacks and tools into potions and consumables.