Keep Driving Understands That Maps Can Be More Than Functional Accessories

By Wallace Truesdale | September 26, 2025 | 10:50am

Video Games Features Keep Driving

Keep Driving Understands That Maps Can Be More Than Functional Accessories

Editor’s Note: This week at Endless Mode, we’re exploring maps and how they help us navigate virtual spaces, both literally and not-so-literally. Whether it’s RPG overworlds that work as abstractions for a larger backdrop or scribbles that offer more insight into the person who sketched them than actual directions, we’ll be offering our thoughts on the near constant presence of in-game maps.

After years of being a navigator at amusement parks, I’ve realized how much their maps suffer from planned obsolescence. When most people visit an amusement park for the first time, either alone or in a group, they tend to check the map as if lives are at stake. It’s a tool that can help them navigate the ever-shifting park elements, but it is really meant to get them to the “good” parts. However, given that most amusement parks aim to keep visitors within their borders for as long as possible, or offer an experience so dizzyingly fun that they turn into repeat customers, maps often begin to feel superfluous. They turn into signalers of a novice rather than tools integral to the experience. By the time park visitors leave, maps end up a souvenir, if not the cherry on top of a trash bin.

The way many open world games, or even games past a certain size, treat maps feels similar. While they initially act as the crutch players rely on to get to the next objective and its promise of fun, maps rarely amount to more than briefly-visited layouts that show off just how big the adventure ahead might be—and not much else. Don’t get me wrong, they’re useful. For as many players as there are who can eventually traverse a digital landscape without glancing at the map button, there is an equal number of directionally challenged folks who need some guidance, no matter how many hours they poured in. Still, at best, I’d argue that this largely makes most maps a functional accessory that doesn’t leave a particularly lasting impression. They assist the experience, but aren’t emphasized as an integral part of it.

Most Popular

This is part of why the open road management game Keep Driving resonates with me. Outside of emulating the other particulars of early 2000s road trips—from creating a killer playlist to dealing with the finite space of a vehicle—it’s the map, which players spend half their playtime looking at, that really seals the deal. Despite the game’s name, you can’t just push the pedal to the metal until your destination, a music festival, appears on the horizon. At every stop, players need to whip out the map, look at the available routes in front of them (plus the time and gas needed to get there), and then circle their next destination before taking off again.

While I wasn’t initially sold on this, I grew to appreciate just how important this time spent with the map was to the overall experience. Keep Driving is not a game about limitless fun. It takes place during the summer, a season where you’ll frequently hear “there’s not enough time in a day” due to all the potential activities you could do, and the deadline for reaching the music festival looms over every decision you make. You are not some special protagonist with otherworldly means of travel, but a regular person who has to consider money and gas in these years before smartphone supremacy. Everything has a cost, and what you can afford varies depending on what the road has in store. Your final destination never changes, but the plan almost inevitably will. So, generally speaking, this is not a world that is meant to be endlessly explored, but instead must be meticulously navigated. A map is necessary.

This front-loading of the map also brings into focus one of its more existential benefits: presenting you with an area on its own terms. Often, one of the ways many games visualize progress, like Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom for example, is by revealing portions of a map. It’s a satisfying brain-scratcher that delivers a sense of accomplishment as players work their way to a full picture, but it’s also not at all how most people interact with maps. While there’s plenty to be explored and discovered as an individual, humanity’s endless quest to satisfy our curiosity (and need for more resources) means that much of the world has already been explored and documented. In other words, it might be your first time somewhere, but you’re rarely the first one there. With that in mind, maps remind you that the world is not only bigger than you, but has moved without you—making a game like Keep Driving feel refreshing in a medium dominated by games that turn you into the world’s main character.

Honestly, I find great peace in not being the first to visit a place. This kind of attitude likely won’t get your name into a history book, but it does let me enjoy maps as more than just tools to navigate a space. They become a reminder that the journey in front of me can be navigated at all. It’s a feeling that many games can miss out in pursuit of engendering a sense of discovery or danger, to further accentuate that you’re traversing a new space. I like exploring new worlds, but I also like traveling within ones that feel grounded by its inhabitants. The map in Keep Driving is integral for pulling this off, ensuring that players know where they’re going and that there are trade-offs to getting there, while reminding us that someone has made this trek before.

Keep Driving doesn’t offer an open world playground to be traversed on your own terms, nor does it plan to sunset the map like an amusement park. It understands that this tool for navigation can be more than that, and as such, never allows it to become an afterthought.

Wallace Truesdale is a journalist and critic who loves games and much of what they come into contact with. He’s written for Unwinnable, Stop Caring, PopMatters, and more. You can usually find him blogging at his site Exalclaw, hanging out on Bluesky and Twitch, or devouring some cookies.