Keep Driving is a Wonderful Addition to the Critically Overlooked Oregon Trail-Like Genre
Talking about The Oregon Trail, The Organ Trail, Emergent Narrative, Rimworld, and Keep Driving
What are some of the gaming experiences that you talk about most? Are they the stories the developers wrote, or your own harrowing experiences of success against the odds? Why is that?
When it comes to gaming experiences, the peak of what games can offer is something called Emergent Narrative.
What is Emergent Narrative?
Definition of emergent from Merriam Websters Dictionary:
1a : arising unexpectedly
b: calling for prompt action : urgent
2a: rising out of or as if out of a fluid
b: rooted in shallow water and having most of its vegetative growth above water
3: arising as a natural or logical consequence
4: newly formed or prominent
Definition 3 and definition 1 are the two that apply to emergent narrative in games.
Games are built upon systems. Therefore when a player takes actions in these systems there are consequences. Sometimes the outcomes of these systems can be predicted by the developer, and other times the system is so complex that the result becomes totally unexpected.
Emergent narrative is what happens when you assign labels to elements in the system (for example calling the things you’re simulating people and naming them after loved ones) which acts in collaboration with the players own imagination to create a story that is unique to you.
You CAN write games like a movie. Many AAA big budget games invest scores of Benjamins to copy movies. Lets be honest though. Movies are really good at being movies.
As interesting as it is to twiddle the protagonist around between movie scenes, movie games feel redundant.
Games exist in an echelon far above movies in their ability to create unique narratives on the fly.
What do I mean by this? Well… Think about it this way. Take, for example, a game like Skyrim. Sure the game has a written narrative, but gamers aren’t sharing stories to each other about the game’s fixed dialogue. All their stories would be the exact same.
When people share stories about Skyrim they recount their own adventures. They weave their own yarn of seeing a bandit camp, sneaking up on the camp, attempting to backstab someone for a quiet kill only to miss and get caught. In a losing fight against the whole camp when all hope was lost, a Dragon suddenly appears over the camp. It lands and the attention suddenly turns from you to the dragon. The camp fights the dragon only to be completely wiped out. With no one left but you and a weakened Dragon you draw your sword and slay the foul beast. Suddenly you’re the victor of this unlikely scenario.
This is the emergent narrative part of Skyrim. The part that nobody planned, but happened anyway.
There’s a great book on the subject by Tynan Sylvester the creator of Rimworld called Designing Games: a Guide to Engineering Experiences.
Fun fact: Tynan wrote that book before creating Rimworld which has gone on to be one of the best selling and highest rated emergent narrative games of all time.
I bring this up because games have been pulling off this trick for a long time. One of my favorite lineages of emergent narrative games are those that stem from The Oregon Trail. Which first released all the way back in… 1971!!!!
You can play it for free online here: The Oregon Trail
What defines these games is the idea that you are going on a trip. You name each of the members in your party after people you know. Along the journey you encounter scenarios that injure members, give them disease, and so on. The game truly is about the journey rather then the destination.
Who is that excited about getting to Oregon anyway? Outside of Californians of course.
The meme, “You have died of dysentery,” also stems from The Oregon Trail
While the original Oregon Trail is meant to be educational, there are other descendants that put their own spin on the genre.
The game that got me into the genre is the playfully titled, “The Organ Trail”(2012).
The Organ Trail is a zombie spinoff of its namesake where you play a band of survivors in the zombie apocalypse aboard a station wagon trekking across the country to reach safety. The Organ Trail borrows heavily from the motifs of The Oregon Trail including the ability to die of dysentery.
Though the game was written in hieroglyphics before the age of DOS it’s descendants are few and far between.
There’s Miitopia by Nintendo which uses your custom characters (Miis) to go on emergent adventures through a Fantasy land.
Games like XCOM, For The King, and Curious Expedition borrow some mechanics from The Oregon Trail. The Trail mechanics are never the focus though. The lineage of Trail-Likes is especially tough because it floats very heavily into the realm of TTRPG’s (Table Top Role Playing Games; eg. Dungeons and Dragons)
Which helps to explain why I can’t shut up about Keep Driving! Keep Driving is the closest thing to Oregon Trail that I’ve seen in years, and it’s a very worthy descendant.
Keep Driving asks, what if instead of going cross country to find gold, or get away from zombies, what if you are a young adult in the late 90’s embarking on your ‘coming of age’ road trip.
The aesthetic is remarkable, as you can tell because I’m remarking on it. It takes the road trip and random scenario elements from The Oregon Trail and remixes them in a totally new way.
I’m going to do my best to highlight everything I love about Keep Driving, and some of the things I don’t.
Lets start with a gameplay synopsis.
Keep Driving starts off with a very loose character creator. What’s your name? What’s your relationship with your parents? Do you have a job? What are you bringing with you? What car do you own? Then it gives you a simple quest. You want to go to a music festival that is on the other side of the country. You need to get camping equipment, get a ticket, and get your ass to mars. Not literally.
That’s the premise. It’s the early 90’s though. Your car sucks, it breaks down, it runs out of gas, you get tired, and the road is never in perfect condition. Oh also you’re practically broke.
Almost immediately embarking from your hometown you will run into hitchhikers who need a ride. Each of these hitchhikers come with their own goals, aspirations, and destinations. They can help you, but they can also be a huge nuisance.
You’ll find a busker who’ll give you a cut when you stay at each town, but you have to store his massive guitar case. A punk that wants to go to an underground show, but also wants to take his dog with him. Among many others.
Additionally every town has different amenities, and different people who need help. You can choose to continue your journey to the festival, but that’s just one ending. Your road trip can continue long after you miss the festival deadline. As your road trip spans through the months you discover new things you might want to do.
Do you claim your inheritance, or decide to become a drag racing legend?
The story of your road trip is interesting and engaging. It becomes even more interesting as you fail. If your car breaks down, if you run out of gas or money you are forced to get creative in how you move forward with your journey.
I’m using the compliment sandwich methodology for reviewing this game. So lets talk about some bad stuff, then I’ll go back to the good stuff.
I have two main points of contention with Keep Driving.
Firstly is the road encounter system. When you encounter something on the road you enter a “combat.” The combat works by using abilities to match the total resource cost of the obstacle. Perhaps I’m just bad at the combat, but it feels to me like the system remains pretty shallow throughout the playthrough. Sure as you upgrade your car you get some effects, and certain items in your inventory will have effects on the initial combat encounter. But rarely do decisions you make cause huge cascades of effects as they do in something like Slay the Spire or Balatro for example.
This leaves the “combat” system feeling shallow and uninteresting. Lets give the game a little bit of credit. There are unlockable abilities as you level up through a run. Unfortunately the most interesting abilities that cause big cascades are usually limited to two uses per sleep. Depending on the length of the road you can encounter anywhere from four to six combats between towns. So you can only use the cool abilities on two encounters of six.
To add insult to injury, the aforementioned “fun” abilities are typically the highest tier abilities. So not only have I worked for an entire hour or two hour run to get the abilities, but I also can’t use them more than twice.
This makes me very sad.
I wish there were more items/abilities that showed their effects more often in a way that didn’t delete them from being able to do it later.
The other thing that feels like a missed opportunity is the lack of meaningful status effects on your party members. There are temporary status effects that apply to the entire group, but they are largely mechanical and rarely emergently change a characters unique status in such a way to be meaningful. Sure npc’s can go from happy to sad, but there’s no system to give them more personality than they were programmed with.
There’s nothing the player or the system can do that would cause NPC’s to get up and leave randomly. None of the characters evolve in a meaningful way as you play. This is something that The Oregon Trail, and The Organ Trail do really well. It also makes me think of games like XCOM. Games where you are meant to be with characters for a long time and as you play they develop trauma, biases, specialties, and so forth.
The Hitchhikers that you meet also end up feeling a tad bit shallow as a result of their lack of growth over the journey outside of their combat leveling.
Lets finish off this review with some more things that I really like that I feel expand on the genre in an extremely positive way.
Meta-Progression
Meta-progression in a game means that progress from your previous road-trips can affect your progression in future road trips. This has become quite common practice with games that involve multiple runs, and has become quintessential to the Rogue-Lite genre.
Keep Driving implements meta-progression in a couple ways.
Firstly as you complete journeys you unlock the different cars available. At the start you only have access to a station wagon, but there’s also a truck and a sports car that can be unlocked.
Secondly, any upgrades that you apply to your cars at an auto shop are transferred between runs. So it’s highly favorable to upgrade your car since those upgrades help you not only on this journey, but also the next one. It’s a tad bit anachronistic. Your character is doing the whole start from scratch coming of age thing, yet the car has been back to the futured for them to use. Narratively it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, but I don’t mind.
Finally, the last meta-progression is the in-game music.
The music in Keep Driving is perfect. I would change literally nothing about the music in the game. I do wish there was a way to queue specific albums, but all the music you come across is amazing.
As you play the game you find access to different CD’s. They can be acquired by either talking to NPC’s or by buying them from specific stores. Each CD expands your available music library for all future runs. The music in the game is so perfect for the late 90’s road trip aesthetic.
Finding new CD’s has been one of the main motivators to keep playing the game past beating the main quest. I love that aspect.
In summary, while I don’t think Keep Driving is perfect, I’ve had a ton of fun spending my time in this late 90’s fantasy world. I love exploring, finding new music, meeting new people, and just enjoying the road. It’s Oregon Trail roots are evident, and I wish more games would take a stab at this genre. I hope the game continues to receive support in the future as well because I think with just a few tweaks here and there it could go from great to spectacular.
Did I miss your game?
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