Keep Driving, the pixel-art road trip RPG from the two-person Swedish studio Y/CJ/Y, reaches PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S and Nintendo Switch today, September 28. More than a year and a half after its PC debut in February 2025, the game is leaving Steam for the first time, and the PC version is getting official mod support through the Steam Workshop on the same day.
The studio says Keep Driving has sold 300,000 copies on PC. For a game made by two people, that is a big number, and it goes a long way to explaining why a small management RPG about a summer road trip is getting a full console rollout instead of quietly winding down.
What Keep Driving actually is
The setup is simple and deliberately low-stakes. It is the early 2000s, you have just bought your first car, and you have heard about a festival on the other side of the country. You plot a route on a paper map and set off across a procedurally generated countryside, one road at a time. How you get there, and whether you get there at all, is up to you.
Along the way you pick up hitchhikers, and each one brings a personality, a set of skills and a story of their own. You take odd jobs to pay for fuel, repair and upgrade the car, and manage the energy and mood of everyone crammed inside it. The developers list Oregon Trail II, FTL and the car-maintenance game Jalopy among their inspirations, alongside road movies like Two-Lane Blacktop and Paris, Texas. That mix shows: this is a resource-management game dressed in the melancholy of a long summer drive.
Turn-based combat, sort of
The road throws obstacles at you, and Keep Driving handles them with what the studio calls turn-based "combat", in quotation marks. The enemies are things like a tractor you are stuck behind or a stretch of speed cameras. You beat them by lining up your passengers' skills and whatever you have stashed in the glovebox against the threats each event throws up, rather than by fighting anyone.
It is a clever way to put a combat system into a game that has no violence in it, and it keeps the tension of a card game without breaking the relaxed tone. The game's own tagline is a reminder to take it easy: you are young, and you have time.
Short runs, multiple endings
A single trip lasts roughly one to four hours, according to the developers, and the game has multiple endings. It is built to be replayed: once you reach the end of the road, you go back to the start and see what happens if you take a different route, pick up different people or make different choices. The procedural map means no two trips play out quite the same way.
The soundtrack leans into the setting as well. You collect songs along the way and play them on a mix CD of local Swedish indie bands, a small analogue touch that fits a game so focused on the texture of the early 2000s.
What the console versions include
The console releases include the updates the PC version has received since launch, among them the expanded localization and the controller support added along the way. That controller work, and the Steam Deck verification that came with it, is presumably what made moving to PS5, Xbox and Switch a manageable job for a team this small.
Steam Workshop arrives as a beta
PC players get something new today too. Keep Driving now supports official mods through the Steam Workshop, so players can build and share their own road trips. Y/CJ/Y is rolling it out as a beta first, so you have to opt into a dedicated Steam branch to use it while the studio collects feedback before a full release.
For a game whose appeal rests on new encounters and new passengers, mods are a natural fit. Custom hitchhikers, events and routes could keep it going well beyond the content the two developers can make themselves.
Who is behind it
Y/CJ/Y is based in Gothenburg and is made up of Josef Martinovsky and Christopher Andreasson. The studio's earlier games include The Aquatic Adventure of the Last Human, Sea Salt and the fast first-person shooter POST VOID, which makes the gentle pace of Keep Driving all the more of a left turn. The game is published by Y/CJ/Y alongside Kepler Ghost.
If you missed Keep Driving on PC, today's launch is the easiest way in: a short, replayable road trip that rewards going back for another run. And if you already played it on Steam, the Workshop beta is a good reason to go back.
