Nomad Drive turned me into a survivalist camper van hoarder

As someone who covers indie games, I love diving into a new demo and getting a feel for a game. As a writer who actually needs to get some work done, there is nothing worse for my productivity than a demo that sucks me in for four hours, but there’s also nothing that makes me happier than a game having that ability. It’s a weird position to be stuck in, and it’s exactly what happened when I played Nomad Drive. 

Nomad Drive by Indie Devil is not usually my “type” of game, or at least I didn’t think it was. I don’t generally gravitate toward games that make you put together a car and then send you off into the wilderness, but apparently I’ve been missing out. What with Arctic Drive and now Nomad Drive, I might have a new “type.” 

Survivalist aesthetic hoarding

If you’ve ever played a game of this genre before, you’ll know the loop: start with a shell of a vehicle, stick the parts in, set out to find new ones, and explore the wilderness while maintaining your vehicle to make sure it doesn’t lose a wheel, run out of battery, or otherwise fall to pieces on the road. That’s exactly the loop in Nomad Drive, or at least I’m fairly confident it’s supposed to be, but I seem to have taken a different route.

I turned into a camper van interior designer.

The whole point of this game is that you’re supposed to survive in the wilderness, but either I’m very good at doing that or Nomad Drive was going easy on me, because I became something of a hoarder. And rather than letting that hoard sit in unorganized piles, I collected storage boxes and furniture so I could make the back of my van aesthetically pleasing.  

There’s nothing better than taking a run-down small space and making it cozy, and that’s exactly what I did. My food, batteries (of which I have many), and maintenance gear each have their own organized containers. My tools have the perfect places to hang on the wall, even if the crowbar goes against all known laws of physics in the process, and I have an entire area dedicated to plants. It really is my very own slice of paradise back there. 

Sentiment over logic

I’m a pretty sentimental person at the best of times, so when you send me out on a solo adventure with a rusted-out campervan and let me customize it, I’m going to get attached, and I think that’s okay. Except in Nomad Drive, you’re supposed to upgrade to a much bigger camper van a little way down the road when your hoard starts getting a bit too sizable for the original VW-style camper.

I drove past that “upgrade” six times in the four hours I was playing. The first time, I truly considered moving everything over and marveled at how much space the larger van had. I even went as far as taking all the wheels off my original van and putting them on the new one. But in the end, I couldn’t quite bring myself to do it.

I felt bad! That original little camper has been with me since the beginning. It’s been through the wringer thanks to my initially terrible driving. It’s lost a wheel a few times, broken down in the middle of the night, and left me stranded, but I can’t just abandon it at the side of the road. Besides, I’m already three paint cans deep in the recoloring job, and sunk cost fallacy is a very real phenomenon.

Endless exploration

Thanks to the procedural generation of the world within Nomad Drive, there’s always something new to explore just beyond the horizon, and the hope of finding just the thing you need can keep you playing long after you thought you’d stop. I kept saying I’d stop after the next landmark, but then I would still be missing something or looking for a certain item, and it kept driving me to the next place. 

Well, I did the driving, but you know what I mean. 

While playing the demo, the only real danger came from my terrible driving skills making me lose parts of the van. Everything feels calm and open, with nothing coming at you from around the next bend. No threats, just exploration alone or with friends, and that’s refreshing. Of course, you do need to keep an eye on thirst and hunger, but I never had a problem sourcing water or food (all part of the hoard), so there’s very little pressure beyond keeping the van in one piece. 

Nomad Drive will enter early access at some point in October 2026, with a bunch of new content and features joining the already addictive mix. The demo is available right now and, if my playtime is anything to go by, you can easily lose hours exploring the vast expanse of nothing.