9 Days in a Van with your 3 Best Friends

I am guessing that it would not surprise my readers to learn that I wasn’t especially cool in middle or high school; the traits that get you super into IF don’t to be the ones that get you celebrated by your peers in your teenaged years, after all, and I’ll freely admit that I had a bit of a superiority complex back then, which didn’t help matters. I went to a science and engineering focused college, so while nobody was a nerd, nobody, myself included, was cool either. But! For one weird period of about eighteen months in the early to mid aughts, when I was in law school and living in NYC, I found that I’d accidentally become sort of cool? I’d gotten heavily into indie rock, streaming Seattle’s KEXP 24/7, and since my lifestyle was entirely supported by staggeringly-high student loans, the $15 it took to go to a show in a mid-sized venue was a drop in the bucket, even when I was going to one or two a week.

I saw the Arcade Fire before everybody had heard about them, and then again when people were starting to hear about them at a gig where David Byrne joined them on stage and David Bowie was in the audience; I went to a Mountain Goats show where they played songs off the Sunset Tree six months before it was released; I saw the Yeah Yeah Yeahs open for Sleater-Kinney before they blew up, so everyone, myself included, was talking over their set. Going to so many shows meant I picked up a lot about what being in a band is like just by osmosis, and it made for a very odd period where e.g. my roommate’s cool sister came to visit him and I could actually keep up with her references and drop a few neat tidbits of my own. Of course, it wasn’t long after that that the world came to its senses and realized, correctly, that hipsters were annoying, and indie rock stopped being cool, which frankly came as something of a relief. But it was fun while it lasted!

9 Days in a Van with Your 3 Best Friends definitely has some nostalgic appeal to me, then – even though it’s set almost a decade and a half before the times I’m reminiscing about, the mechanics of tours, merch sales, and intraband drama are reasonably eternal. Indeed, the best thing about this game (and there’s a lot to like) is the way it focuses on those mechanics. Sure, the gigs themselves are high points, well-realized set pieces where you check out the other bands with a mixture of anxiety, envy, and genuine curiosity before taking the stage and hoping to wow the audience. But that’s not just from love of the game, it’s also because if the performance doesn’t drive enough t-shirt and tape sales to pay for the next day’s gas, you’re going to be in trouble. Often finding a place to park and a safe place to crash for the night loom way larger than dreams of radio airplay, and 9 Days in a Van also doesn’t shy away from depicting all the repetition, forced downtime, and boredom in between the moments of triumph and heartbreak. Luck will only take you so far, since this is a long game (and at least in the build I played, saving and loading didn’t seem to work), and so the stakes for your decisions feel appropriately high; I admit that I looked up a map of the Lower East Side for the bit where you’re looking for street parking based only on a vague description of where you should be heading, while you’re minutes away from show-time.

That focus on minutiae sets it apart from a lot of more traditional music-biz stories, even if some of the plot beats are the same. You’re a substitute drummer filling in at the last minute when the band’s regular one broke his arm just before their first big cross-country tour, and as you make your way from Boston to Oregon, you get to know the mercurial and charismatic frontman, the sensitive bassist who’s started writing some solo stuff, and the nerdy keyboard player who’s visibly relieved you’re here because now you’re the third wheel, not her. The game leans into your role as the drummer, too – just as the drummer needs to play the beat that keeps the other musicians locked in the right tempo, so too are you tasked with keeping the band together, mediating their little spats and feuds, making sure everyone gets where they need to get, and hopefully having a good time yourself along the way.

The writing is great, helping infuse what could be stock types with real humanity, and alternating (funny) jokes with more sincere moments. The social dynamics within the band ring true; they’re dense, tense, and always shifting, with you as a newcomer desperately trying to keep up:

Somewhere there’s a tape of the band as a trio with Rafa on drums and vocals but he insists they only ever did that as a joke. They have a lot of inside jokes that aren’t actually funny. You laugh anyway.

The references are dense too, appropriately so given that these people would be talking about music and their scene all the time, and while I probably only got half of them, my notes are still filled with bits I enjoyed, like radio taglines I swear I remember from when I was a kid to the bit about listening to Walk This Way until it’s totally clear that Run DMC isn’t going to be joining. Heck, I even lived in Boston for a while, so I’ve been to a couple of the venues that get name-checked. The only thing that struck a slightly wrong note for me was the way the game uses “indie” when in 1991 the appropriate word probably should have been “alternative”, but even that could be a concession to modern audiences (even at the time, “alternative to what?” was a common question). And this isn’t just name-dropping to sound cool; it all works together to create a verisimilitudinous backdrop for the drama, grounding the characters in their world.

9 Days in a Van also isn’t afraid to get a little loose. Whenever you’re riding in the van, you can read a different story in the sci-fi anthology you’ve toted along with you; there are dream that parody text adventure conventions or liken your journey to the Oregon Trail; and there are a bunch of (actually really good!) journal prompts where you can diegetically write the protagonist’s thoughts into a text box. Sure, just as the band says they play “sloppycore”, there are a couple places where this ambition means the game’s lo-fi aesthetic tips over into a few rough patches – besides the aforementioned save/load bug, the last act feels pretty abbreviated, so a few climactic beats don’t have much time to breathe – but if that’s the price of something with this much drive, energy, and pure cool, its one the audience should happily pay.