Your mileage may vary with anomaly-filled survival game
Pacific Drive is a first-person, single-player driving survival game set in the Pacific Northwest with a customizable, upgradeable car serving as the player’s main companion. Developed by Ironwood Studios and published by Kepler Interactive, Pacific Drive turns what could have been a fun road trip into a punishing fight for survival.
Players take on the role of a nameless Driver, who has somehow breached what’s known as the Olympic Exclusion Zone — a vast area sealed off with 900-foot-high walls after some kind of disastrous experiment. The world-building is reminiscent of anomaly-filled titles like STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl. There’s a lot of really interesting world-lore that can be explored bit by bit through gameplay.
Our driver finds a busted-up old station wagon that looks like it belongs in a “National Lampoon” movie, and after a few basic repairs manages to get to a garage. Some helpful scientists over the car radio, who were also trapped in the exclusion zone, are pretty much all the human contact our driver will get as he tries to survive and escape the zone, which of course can only be done by going deeper into it and trying to unlock its mysteries.
The basic gameplay loop is that of an extraction looter — venturing out from the garage, trying to survive the weird stuff conjured up by electrical storms and other strange phenomena, gathering parts and blueprints, and finally collecting enough energy to teleport back to the garage.
There are definitely points where the gameplay can feel a bit repetitive, especially when every time you need to get out of the car involves a checklist (stop the car, engage parking brake, turn off lights, turn off engine, open door), and there’s going to be a lot of obsessing over the car between missions, such as with diagnosing and fixing malfunctions and repairing/crafting parts.
It’s definitely a unique concept for a game, and it’s cool to see these lesser-known studios taking gambles and making something that isn’t just a clone of other, more successful projects.
There can be a bit of loneliness with a lack of NPCs, and stories told mainly through the radio and lost recordings, sort of like in Fallout games.
Like a knight errant (or errant knight) on a rusty steed, you’ll take your station wagon out again and again into the ever-changing unknown, with your fate tied to the car’s, as you loot the world and upgrade both the garage and your ride. There are a lot of systems to keep track of, which is either great or terrible, depending on what kind of player you are.
And then your car just has to go and get a temperamental personality of its own, where it may decide to just turn off at critical moments or pop the hood while driving at 40 mph, requiring its personality disorders to be diagnosed and repaired.
There’s a lot of beautiful vistas and scenery to take in (the Pacific Northwest is gorgeous, bizarre anomalies or not), and the soundtrack is pretty exceptional, too. All told, expect about 20-25 hours of gameplay from Pacific Drive. There are some rogue-like elements, but with the story being the best part, and much of the gameplay repetitive, there isn’t much replay value here.