Keep Driving captures a specific kind of nostalgic fantasy. In the game, you drive a beat-up jalopy down bumpy rural byways. You stop to fill up at gas stations, not at charging bays. You buy CDs; you don’t stream music. And you’ll finish many of your trips at an outdoor music festival, with camping tents and lollygagging youths sprawled across a large muddy field. It’s a destination which feels more consonant with 1960s events like Woodstock than something more modern. Keep Driving is a road trip simulator, wrapped in the earth-toned aesthetics of a vanished past. There’s a strong sense of familiarity, too, even when the world it depicts, with its rural towns, wintry mountains, and retro cars, is an alien one to many of us.

Growing up a city kid, it took me years to work up the desire to even learn how to drive, let alone go out and apply for a license. It wasn’t until I was in college that I finally took and passed a road test. My new driver’s license unlocked a freedom I hadn’t even known I was missing. I felt like I could go anywhere, newly untethered from the confining grid of the city’s public transportation system.

During summer breaks from school, I’d borrow my mom’s lumpy Corolla and take it on long trips upstate to visit my on-again off-again girlfriend. Between us lay an interminably long stretch of interstate, punctuated by rest stops and traffic cops. I’d rotate through my CD collection and blast the car’s AC to fight the blistering August sun streaming in through the windshield.

Sometimes we’d meet at her parent’s house, nestled within a shady suburb. Other times, it’d be at a park or rest stop located halfway between us. There would be arguments and fights, abrupt goodbyes and long, tearful hugs. We’d have desperate rendezvouses in Stewart’s gas station parking lots, crammed together into the Corolla’s backseat, fingers struggling against belt buckles and stubborn clasps, our bodies quickly breaking away whenever a gas station attendant wandered too close.

It was a period of gleefully foolish youthfulness. We were as reckless with our emotions as we were when making hasty lane-changes onto highway offramps. My hopes rode high, and I’d hop into the car at the slightest chance of consummating them. This craving for freedom and adventure sits at the core of Keep Driving’s nostalgia. Freedom on four wheels, freedom found at the bottom of a tank of gas, freedom to go nowhere, cradled in the dream of places far away.

There’s a one-size-fits all nature to the feeling Keep Driving creates. After all, the car unites the American psyche in a way few other things do. But being such a central facet of American life to so many people means the car also sits at some important and inescapable fault lines.

It’s hard not to wonder, for example, how Keep Driving’s minigame of getting pulled over by a cop might go if the default character the game assigned you wasn’t white. No amount of high-level abilities and unique cards would prevent their hands from hovering dangerously close to the butt of their service pistol, or keep their eyes from sizing you up over the rims of their tactical Oakleys.

You can get up to all kinds of trouble in Keep Driving; trouble that I tend to avoid when behind the wheel of my own car. Getting high, driving sleep-deprived or drunk; activities that serve as missions and challenges within the game don’t feel like terribly realistic options outside of it. Growing up in a city, growing up black, I learned how to live within certain impervious limitations. I grew up surrounded by steep walls that would not have existed had I lived a few dozen miles north, and been born a few shades lighter.

Given all that, it’s hard not to fall for Keep Driving’s rose-tinted motor fantasy. Its vision of open-road freedom remains a desirable one. It’s the freedom you feel with a full tank of gas, after you’ve earned some cash from an easy temp gig, tossed a pizza into the trunk, slid in a CD, and peeled off towards some thrilling new opportunity just round the bend. It’s the freedom to fuck things up and lose it all. It’s the freedom that comes with knowing your mom is waiting at home, just a phone call away, ready to come rescue you and get you back on your feet.

I never experienced this specific freedom, but those early years of driving offered me a shade of it. Tearing across the asphalt, late at night, making wrong turns off of crumpled MapQuest printouts. The language is still the same, even if the words and phrases are different. Defrosting window panes drenched in torrential rain, barely held back by shuddering wipers. Flat tires, engine lights, and low tank indicators. It’s as universal as it is specific. A fading memory. Something you miss more of, the older you get - something you never even had.

***

Yussef Cole, one of Bullet Points’ editors, is a writer and motion graphic designer. His writing on games stems from an appreciation of the medium tied with a desire to tear it all down so that something better might be built. Find him on Bluesky as @youmeyou.