Littering Souls On The Asphalt

When we walk around and we're dizzy and all
I don't want it to stop, I don't want it to end
When we pass the time and it's all meaningless
I don't want you to go, I don't want you to leave

I want to get paid to run. I want a paycheck for drifting away. I want a one-way to "get me the fuck out of here."

The urge to drive away and abandon my life was a constant, nagging urge in the recesses of my, at the time, undeveloped mind cavern – a signature of my youthful folly. I used to walk around the snow-covered streets of a small Ohio college town, solemnly blasting toe, Duster, This Heat, and viciously hating myself and my life.

I would internally mutter "The hell with all this! Blast this school and everyone in it! Fuck my whole life! I want to go on a permanent sabbatical – an endless road trip!''

Alas, no driver's license or junkyard car, the urge slowly started to fade. I am now more settled than ever. I live a moderately happy life, possess a semblance of a career outside the world of videogames and feel relatively stable, impending techno-fascist apocalypse not-withstanding.

What was incredible about playing through YCJY's new game, Keep Driving, was how accurately it portrayed the feeling of driving through the American countryside – the introspection, the freedom; the stress, the heartache. It immediately hearkened me back to my punk days, on the brief Midwestern tours I partook in and screamed my gay little heart out. It immediately made me feel 10 years younger, dirt-broke, beautiful and free. It recreated the escapist fantasies and internal processes of my youthful rebellion.

It's rare for a game to elicit strong feelings in me – it's even rarer for a game to represent an emotional feeling to synaptic perfection. Playing Keep Driving felt the same as hittin' the road on a long drive. It made me want to run away again.

YCJY's previous endeavor, Post Void, was specifically catered to my weirdo tastes – what with its psilocybin-laced visuals, frenetic shooter-y gameplay and aggressive cacophony of noise and flashing lights. Heck, I loved the game so much it was the subject of my first-ever article for Superjump Magazine, alongside the equally excellent Mullet Mad Jack.

Keep Driving pumps the brakes and gives us a relatively more relaxed experience. It's a management RPG where you...well...drive a beat-up car, pick up hitchhikers, complain about the exorbitant price of gas and try to survive such dastardly road obstacles like potholes and marooned herds of sheep.

What do you manage? Well, the same things you balance in a regular road trip: your exhaustion, making sure you got enough gas in the tank, ensuring your junk car doesn't suddenly break down and keeping enough dollars in your wallet so as to not quickfall into destitution.

During your time on the road, you'll encounter what the game coins "Road Events". These are your "battle scenarios" for lack of a better term. Your dashboard lights up with colorful symbols, each representing one of the 4 resources. A warning sign lights up above a certain symbol – uh oh, that's trouble! If you don't use an item or one of the cards that dangle from your rearview mirror to clear said hazard, you will take a loss that reduces said resource. Get to 0 in any resource and you're shit out of luck, but there are ways of getting back on the road should you be overcome by failure.

In truth...the gameplay is not the shining point of this game. It's serviceable, sure, it could even be quite fun at times, but it was the least interesting aspect of the game. It's the pathos the game is submerged in that makes it an endearing must-play.

It's chock full of 2000's nostalgia. No smartphones in sight, I unfurl my trusty map to guide me through desolate country roads and vast highways. I stop, exhausted, at a lonely rural gas station and want to shoot myself when I see the cost of filling up my tank.

Subtle references to economic depression cling to the shell of this road trip simulator, which, in truth, is just par for the course for a road trip. Do you want to see the real America? You get in your car and drive – witness the devastation the almighty dollar has caused. The abandoned towns and villages the railroads forgot, the nomads that have no place to call home, the poor people escaping personal turmoil. Watch the forests that were razed to build the asphalt roads our littered souls get scattered on. Yet, the road is one of the few places I've felt truly free – in front of its depressive backdrop lies the foreground of liberty and adventure. The sweet air; the flowing wind; the lack of adult responsibilities.

As cliche as the following statement is, Keep Driving is less about the destination and more about the journey itself. This is a game that goes places, in more than one way. The moment you press "New Game" you are 20 years old again. You are young – take your time.

It's the early 2000's and I just bought a junker. I'm on summer break from college, staying at my parent's abode on the West Coast. I have a pretty good relationship with them. Not great, not horrible either. They love and support me and I reciprocate as best I can. The summer blaze infects my mind like a haze. This sleepy town never has any damn thing goin' on. I bought the car with a purpose: to have a solid excuse to regale my parents with as to why I am not spending the whole summer inside helping my dad clean out his garage.

A better justification comes in the mail: an envelope holds an invitation to the sickest, raddest, coolest music festival in the world, all the way on the opposite side of the country. I am moved by the call of rock and roll. I barely need a kick in the ass to get me going anywhere – anywhere except here, rotting away the summer.

I could've picked a cooler lookin' car, but I ended up going with the trusty sedan over the cool-factor muscle car and the hardier truck. To faithfully bring me back to my IRL punk days, I forwent my mom's care package and packed the trunk with a whole case of beer and my trusty electric car. And so, I drive.

An anachronistic song blares from my old cassette tape player. The shoegaze causes my vision to exhibit TV static. It's a cold day in February, as I sit down in front of my monitor screen. Yet, when my eyes clear, I feel the warmth radiating through my windshield. I feel the wind rushing in through my open car window, and for the first time in a long time, I feel the twinge of responsibility slowly fade, replaced by the comforting embrace of wanderlust.

I expertly dodge through potholes, hold down a panic attack while being tailgated by an aggressive driver, and patiently wait behind a very slow tractor. Barely out of my hometown, I see a raised thumb, attached to a pixelated blur.

The blur is a balding middle-aged man, he dons a dirty dress shirt that is partially untucked, his tie is almost undone and hanging from his neck as if it's a noose come undone...corporate jobs, am I right? He seems shake and nervous, but despite my fear of strange men, I let him ride shotgun, for which he is immensely thankful.

Unlucky sucker lost his job, and he wants a ride to the nearest town with an unemployment office. Making a couple of bucks here and there isn't such a bad idea on the road...it's not like the festival is starting anytime soon, and it is going on for a long time.

Hitchhikers are akin to your party companions in a regular RPG. They get their own cards which you can deftly use in road events. They offer opportunities for emergent storytelling, and following their own quests to the end might even grant you a different ending. Despite everything thrown my way, I never forgot the promise of the festival, and ignorantly continued towards the East Coast.

I drop the Suit off and decide to walk in with him to get a part-time job. I work at a farm for a couple of days and sleep in my car at night. The man, who in the code of road anonymity I don "The Suit", asks if he can ride a while with me, "just for a couple of weeks." The trip has been good for him, says he needs it. Says he can't go back to his family...not yet. We could both use the company.

As I start the ignition, he tells me about his kids and then asks if he can smoke a cigarette. "Yea, but only if I can bum one". He hands me a cig and I light it up while speeding out of town. I am cold, tired, and slightly malnourished, but I am happy.

It's not every day you see a woman in a ruined wedding dress with a thumb waving in the wind. We greet The Bride, and have her hop on the back with another passenger we picked up earlier.

"Where you heading to?", The Suit asks.

"Anywhere that isn't a church", she replies.

Chick's a wildcard. She's secretive, doesn't divulge much about her past, but the implications are hidden in plain sight – not much need for nuance and criticality to read between the lines and capture the subtext of her story.

She's a person who, like many young folks, wants to taste freedom before she is shackled by adult life. I can empathize: this road trip is a last hoorah for me as well. School's almost over, after a few years I will have to get a soul-sucking job. Dreams of freedom die on the highway, not in a car crash, but in the soft abandonment of rubber tires on cement. This road trip will not happen again.

We get drunk at a nearby town and sleep off the alcohol, despite The Bride and the other passenger, who we have named "The Hurricane" for reasons that will soon become apparent, urge me to drive while intoxicated. As much as I detest authority and rules, I don't think it's very "punk" to endanger myself, my passengers and other drivers on the road.

As we continue along, my rear-view mirror spots a motorcycle gang between us. The Bride chides them with screams and insults. They start banging on the car, cursing and hollering at us. "Do you know these guys?" I ask. "No" she says with a giggle. This is funny to her. We're about to get killed by a bunch of bikers with "1 percent" patches and she's laughing.

I was remiss to mention using the cards to rid yourself of hazards might also drain a resource. Most commonly, a card might require a hit of gas or tire you out a bit more. If a road event is too gnarly, too treacherous, you can always brake hard, take damage for each light-up symbol on the dashboard and continue along your journey. In a moment of weed-induced stupor, I forgot this facet of mechanical engagement.

I push my foot to the brakes and the car stops hard. What happens next is a blur. All I can hear is the screeching of tires, the crashing of metal husks and a single scream emanating from the Bride.

Tears roll down my face. The crash totaled my car and left the metal husk dripping with oil. I barely have 15 bucks to my name, all of us are too exhausted to walk to the closest town for some gas, and even if we could come back with a full can, my car is an absolute mess and won't start. I call a tow truck and the guy laughs at my face and promptly hangs up when I tell him I can't afford it. I am still crying, and no-one is comforting me as I freak out.

I am left without options. I hesitantly call my mother and between gulps of tears and mucus, I explain my situation to her. She wires me 200 dollars and we return to the previous town.

The theme of class is always at the forefront of Keep Driving. In rural America, you will find poverty. The soon-to-be ghost towns of tomorrow. It's clear from your parents' humble abode they are comfortably middle class. They are not stacked with cash. Depending on your relationship with them, you get to roll a die to get some money and salvage your failed run. Each time you call, there's a chance the game will end with the game's worst ending – your parents decide to stop bankrolling you and force you to get a boring office job. So long, wasted youth.

I'm not sure what's more embarrassing: begging my parents for money as a full-grown adult, crashing my car with less than a month of ownership or fumbling my attempts to impress an attractive woman. By the time I turn back to face the Bride, she is gone. While I was freaking out, she silently made her exit and faded off into the night. We never saw her again.

After nursing my wounded pride from having to plead with my parents for money, I drop off The Suit. Says the road's been fun and all, but it's about time he goes to see his wife and kids again.

It's just me and the Hurricane. She's more than earned her nickname. She is always inviting me to get high or have a beer on the road. She smokes like a chimney and litters the car with cigarette butts, styrofoam cups and empty liquor bottles. She's a typical rich girl passing off as an adventurous woman. She talks openly about having friends all over, hoping we pass by her friend's log cabin that's "oh so cool".

The Suit and I were initially very annoyed with her, but she had a way with words and, surprisingly, got us out of trouble using her charisma more than once. I was dreading being on the road alone with her. Little did I know, she would become a reassuring confidant and an unlikely friend.

In one of the next towns, I receive a worrying piece of news. A letter from my grandma's doctor informz me she is no longer responding well to the treatment. My grandma is dying. The doctor says she has a few days left, a week at most.

You don't know pain until you have to sell your guitar to afford the necessary car repairs and gas to make it on time to visit your dying grandma. I told you Keep Driving goes places, I just didn't expect that "place" to be to grieve my fictional grandmother after burying my real nonna a few weeks before.

We change course from the south and head northeast passing by some stunningly beautiful mountains. Picturesque. For the first time, the trip is silent. There's no music blaring from the car speakers, and The Hurricane has stopped her incessant yapping.

When night falls, and we stop at a nearby inn for a good night's sleep, the Hurricane finally bleats. "Real sorry about your grandma, dude. What a bummer." I let out a measly "Thanks..." before shuffling my feet and asking "You want me to drop you off somewhere?". She looks at me quizzically. "Are you kidding? No, dude. This trip has been a blast! I'm here for you, man. Let's go see your grandma so you can say your goodbyes, then let's cheer you up by going to that banging music festival!"

I let out a sly smile. I was initially annoyed with her constant referrals of me as "dude" and "bro". I can sense sincerity in her words, even if another part of me feels like I am getting hustled for a free ride to the defining concert of the decade.

We skirt up the mountain roads en route to my grandma's hospital in a big city. The Hurricane is a hoot. We spend nights drinking, we buy some weed and smoke every day on the road...shit, she even finally convinces me to break the law a little and we have fun shoplifting from every gas station and grocery store on our path.

We finally arrive at the city, and I meet with my ailing grandma. Laying on her lap is a manila folder. My inheritance. A house on the opposite side of the coast, a small cabin in the middle of nowhere. A fixer-upper, but a home to call my own. "I love you so much, dear". "I love you too, grandma". We hug for the last time and bid our final farewells.

As much as I'd love to see the gift my grandma left me, my mind's eye is still set firmly on the festival. I remember the adage of the trip, imparted by the game itself: "You are young – take your time." Keep Driving. Plenty of days left in my future to see the house she left me – the house her memory has been imprinted on.

After days of driving, I finally meet my friends at the festival and I was shocked...that's the end. The game has finished. Finito. Over. The ending explains I am pulled from party to party, from set to set, the experiences of that long week coalesce into hazy yet valuable memories. Fuck...I really wanted to see the house grammy left me...

Nonetheless, I found a sublime beauty in that ending, as it fully represents my own lived experiences. I barely remember the tours I went on with my punk band. Fragments of it remain: getting so sick after taking a whiskey-cayenne shot I had to miss the after-party, getting into an argument with my bandmates on the road, playing at a Milwaukee bar in front of a bunch of face-tatted, manly punks who initially hated us. Post-set, we endeared ourselves to them when they saw we rocked the house with our blaring guitar music. All these almost-forgotten memories are so dearly precious to me.

All the introspective thoughts I had on long car rides, speeding through corn-field and abandoned farmhouses, seemed so important and valuable at the time. But today, none of those thoughts remain. What did I think about? Why do I hold memories I've forgotten so dear and near....

Life on the road is for the destitute, the adventurous or both. A toast, to the last nomads of the American wilderness.

People call ruinous yet memorable road trips "wasted youth", but the hazy memories of 24 hour Greyhounds and exhausting music tours coalesce into treasured fondness. It's the beauty and existential terror they produce that molded my consciousness.

I've left remnants of my ghost amongst the back-roads and country highways. America as a nation-state deserves its impending doom. But its people and its landscapes deserve to be haunted by better spirits. The people and the land deserve your protection and love.

Thank you Keep Driving and YCJY, for helping me re-live my youth.