If you only play one February game, make it this car management RPG

digitaltrends.com:

If you love RPGs, you’re probably drowning in them right now. Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2, Avowed, and Monster Hunter Wilds are all sizable commitments that dropped within weeks of one another. You likely don’t have too much time to juggle those three games, let alone anything else, but there’s one more RPG you should add to your list: Keep Driving.

Released earlier this month before a flood of big budget games took center stage, Keep Driving is an “atmospheric management RPG” available now on PC. It casts players as a budding adult who sets out on a cross-country road trip. The goal is to make it to a music festival within a month of traveling. It’s a pixel art adventure that both aims to capture the freedom of the open road and the challenges that come with living a wanderer’s life. If you love creative games that twist genres around to invent something entirely new, Keep Driving is the one game released this February that you should make sure to play.

When my journey begins, I need to make some key decisions. What’s my job, if I even have one? What kind of car do I have? What’s my relationship with my parents? Those are all important questions, as they determine how much space I have in my ride to store items, what gear I’m bringing with me, and the likelihood that my parents will bail me out if I find myself in a tough spot. Once that’s established, I start automatically moving along a 2D road while my CD player spits out some grungy garage rock. I eventually hit a town where I can fuel up, buy snacks, customize my car, and more. When I’m ready to leave, I pick another route from my map and keep on driving to the next town.

It sounds easy enough, but Keep Driving is a surprisingly dense, systems-heavy RPG packed into a bite-sized indie that can be cleared in a few hours. First, I need to learn how to manage my car. I need to keep an eye on its durability and gas level at all times. Of course, that costs money, a scarce resource that I must