There’s nothing quite like cruising down an empty highway while blasting your favourite tunes as the sun sets in the rearview mirror. Trade the empty highway for anomaly-infested roads, the music for ominous radio interference, and the setting sun for a series of pocket hurricanes and you’d find yourself describing Ironwood Studios’ Pacific Drive. Blending the frustrating realism of car maintenance with a surreal sci-fi setting, Pacific Drive is a punishing but consistently intriguing survival game – one that tested both my driving proficiency as well as my wits.
Following some suspicious meddling by scientific corpo-body ARDA, an area of the Pacific Northwest has been walled off from the outside and dubbed the Olympic Exclusion Zone. Now overrun with perplexing, often-pulsating horrors called Anomalies, select scientists remain to investigate what’s left of the woodlands. You step into the non-existent shoes of a mute entity known only as the Driver, who has found themselves behind the wheel of a large automobile. And you may ask yourself, "How did I get here?” Well, with a trove of tools, your trusty station wagon, and some friendly radio chatter to fill the dead air, you’ll seek answers to those questions as you set out on somewhat repetitious expeditions to explore Pacific Drive’s captivating otherworldly landscape.
Your car-panion is more than just a regular dealership junker – in fact, it slowly became my best friend. Linked to the Driver via unknown supernatural forces, your fates are tied, so the wellbeing of your rusty steed is just as important as your own. Every windshield-cracking tree smash made me wince in phantom pain, and you’ll have to manually fix up your fixer-upper back at your base of operations – the Garage. Conveniently owned by your nagging radio guide and ex-ARDA scientist Oppy, you’ll have access to everything you need to maintain and fortify your four-wheeled metal friend, using resources collected while out and about to expand the Garage from an abandoned pit-stop into a proper home. It’s a classic setup for the survival genre, and while it doesn’t reinvent the wheel, your quirky haven is flush with lockers, doo-dads, and retro computer stations that helped to ground me in this atmospheric setting.
Pacific Drive is nothing if not flush with systems and metrics to battle against as you chart its procedural wasteland. Alongside keeping the Driver alive, you’ll need to consider your car’s fuel gauge, battery life, and tyre wear, as well as repair any cracked windows, busted panels and torn-off doors. Such problems demand specific tools and an array of materials that can be found in the open world, so prepare to have a sizable mental shopping list every time you embark. While checking off all the items on that list can be extremely rewarding, Pacific Drive often struggles to walk the fine line between being engaging and overcomplicated, occasionally giving you just a few too many balls to juggle at once.
Don't be too upset when your freshly painted car door gets ripped off.
Beyond simply locating what you need, you’ll have to dodge a litany of hazards and collect enough energy to warp back to base before an oncoming storm hits. Your car also has a personality of its own and will develop unique Quirks that can cause mayhem during a time-sensitive escape. Like Herbie, it can amusingly pop the hood to obscure your vision or switch off the engine in reaction to certain conditions. Unlike Herbie, you can’t just tell the car off to get it back to normal – instead, you’ll need to return to the garage and use a system of ‘If this, then that’ puzzle prompts at the Tinker Station to exorcise its demons. For example, if your car radio is inexplicably forcing you to park, you’ll need to input “radio + stays on + shifter + toggles” into the console and hope for the best. It’s a unique idea that brings welcome silliness (and wanton devastation) to your runs. But while diagnosing the issue is a fun process, getting stuck with a quirk you can’t figure out is a real momentum killer that often attacked my last nerve when all I wanted to do was get back behind the wheel.
Taking a break isn’t always a bad thing, though. While stuck in the Garage, I could reassess and prepare for the next big run, then craft car parts that would offer me the best protection for it. It was fun to put together a shopping list for the more serious upgrades like Insulated doors to fend off electrical strikes or off-road wheels that suited my erratic driving style. More than just functionality, once you face off against the wilds of the forest enough times, you’ll even be able to unlock the Detailing section of your Garage, which allows you to customise the look of your wagon. Hidden throughout derelict structures and ARDA backpacks, you’ll begin to encounter decals and ornamental objects that can zhuzh up your dashboard in amusing ways. You can decorate with bobbleheads, antennas, and stickers until your ride is just right – although, try not to get too upset when your freshly painted door gets ripped off as you tumble off a cliff edge.
Pacific Drive joins the eerie ranks of other Pacific Northwest psychological horrors like Twin Peaks and Alan Wake, harnessing the area's uncanny essence to chilling effect. The occasional sunlit drives offered little respite as heavy fog, suspicious neon flora, and towering tree shadows ensured I was always on edge and bracing for the next inclement anomaly. Finer details help enhance the mood even further, such as abandoned ARDA trailers coated in undulating goo, which often contain lost transmissions and interesting logs that help cement how lonely the Zone has become.
But while it can be appropriately moody, that lack of human interaction eventually took a toll, even with the intermittent and well-acted radio chatter I was receiving. As the grind for resources became more routine, I was begging for something or someone to break up the pattern of going out for resources, returning to make upgrades, and then repeating once again. It wasn’t long before I was giving out sentimental names to all the objects in the Garage as I pottered around sorting my inventory. The sentient item-belching dumpster out back? That’s Grover.
Anomalies have bizarrely fascinating looks that dare you to sneak a peek.
Thankfully, Pacific Drive’s monstrous Anomalies serve as its supporting cast, with bizarrely fascinating designs that dare you to sneak a peek. A siren’s call, if ever there was one, as the closer you move, the more at risk you become. One such baddie, the hovering Abductor, is made up of traffic lights and ooze, luring you in with a pale blue glow. Get too close, and the friendly blue turns to a deep red, as the Abductor chases and latches onto you or your car, dragging the unlucky party into all manner of perils and pitfalls. Rounding out the crew are explosive test dummies that follow you when you’re not looking, and patches of energy that impact your steering, often forcing you off the road, making for a rogues’ gallery with plenty of variety.
With such impressive worldbuilding, it’s a shame that the intimidating atmosphere can take a back seat to the sheer amount of plates you’ll need to spin. Vague mission objectives and awkward-to-find materials meant planning a story-progressing run was often fraught with unpredictability. One attempt at crossing through to the map’s Mid-Zone was so unexpectedly hazardous that I was too battered and quirked up for the return trip but the time I reached my quest objective. What should have been a simple saunter to the homeward gateway was too much to bear, and I lost all of my loot and progress for reasons that felt largely out of my control. As much as I relished the challenge, these half-baked aspects of Pacific Drive added undue annoyance on top of the otherwise well-realised and intentionally difficult systems.
Success can be so trying, but that does also make those hard-fought victories even sweeter. Full up on loot and lore, scraping your way out of a storm into the beckoning beam of light that teleports you home is an electric feeling, especially if you know that the work you managed to get done before your escape will have carved a path into an exciting new area. Resources, including even the basics, do tend to run thin, so returning unscathed from the brink of death warrants a proud dad-level pat on the back.
Unfortunately, the rinse-and-repeat nature of Pacific Drive’s midgame has an impact on the pacing of its story. It follows a trio of scientists grappling with work-life balance in a hallucinatory hellscape, which is an ambitious tale to graft onto a survival game, but the emotional beats didn’t hit as hard as I would have hoped. And ultimately, while it does answer some of the questions it proposes by the time the credits roll, it didn’t address the most interesting concepts that were swirling in my head as I played. Particularly, Pacific Drive ends in a way that felt tied to the trappings of the survival genre rather than honouring the world it had built up over the 20-plus hours it took me to reach its climactic finale.
Continue reading...
Following some suspicious meddling by scientific corpo-body ARDA, an area of the Pacific Northwest has been walled off from the outside and dubbed the Olympic Exclusion Zone. Now overrun with perplexing, often-pulsating horrors called Anomalies, select scientists remain to investigate what’s left of the woodlands. You step into the non-existent shoes of a mute entity known only as the Driver, who has found themselves behind the wheel of a large automobile. And you may ask yourself, "How did I get here?” Well, with a trove of tools, your trusty station wagon, and some friendly radio chatter to fill the dead air, you’ll seek answers to those questions as you set out on somewhat repetitious expeditions to explore Pacific Drive’s captivating otherworldly landscape.
Your car-panion is more than just a regular dealership junker – in fact, it slowly became my best friend. Linked to the Driver via unknown supernatural forces, your fates are tied, so the wellbeing of your rusty steed is just as important as your own. Every windshield-cracking tree smash made me wince in phantom pain, and you’ll have to manually fix up your fixer-upper back at your base of operations – the Garage. Conveniently owned by your nagging radio guide and ex-ARDA scientist Oppy, you’ll have access to everything you need to maintain and fortify your four-wheeled metal friend, using resources collected while out and about to expand the Garage from an abandoned pit-stop into a proper home. It’s a classic setup for the survival genre, and while it doesn’t reinvent the wheel, your quirky haven is flush with lockers, doo-dads, and retro computer stations that helped to ground me in this atmospheric setting.
Pacific Drive is nothing if not flush with systems and metrics to battle against as you chart its procedural wasteland. Alongside keeping the Driver alive, you’ll need to consider your car’s fuel gauge, battery life, and tyre wear, as well as repair any cracked windows, busted panels and torn-off doors. Such problems demand specific tools and an array of materials that can be found in the open world, so prepare to have a sizable mental shopping list every time you embark. While checking off all the items on that list can be extremely rewarding, Pacific Drive often struggles to walk the fine line between being engaging and overcomplicated, occasionally giving you just a few too many balls to juggle at once.
Don't be too upset when your freshly painted car door gets ripped off.
Beyond simply locating what you need, you’ll have to dodge a litany of hazards and collect enough energy to warp back to base before an oncoming storm hits. Your car also has a personality of its own and will develop unique Quirks that can cause mayhem during a time-sensitive escape. Like Herbie, it can amusingly pop the hood to obscure your vision or switch off the engine in reaction to certain conditions. Unlike Herbie, you can’t just tell the car off to get it back to normal – instead, you’ll need to return to the garage and use a system of ‘If this, then that’ puzzle prompts at the Tinker Station to exorcise its demons. For example, if your car radio is inexplicably forcing you to park, you’ll need to input “radio + stays on + shifter + toggles” into the console and hope for the best. It’s a unique idea that brings welcome silliness (and wanton devastation) to your runs. But while diagnosing the issue is a fun process, getting stuck with a quirk you can’t figure out is a real momentum killer that often attacked my last nerve when all I wanted to do was get back behind the wheel.
Taking a break isn’t always a bad thing, though. While stuck in the Garage, I could reassess and prepare for the next big run, then craft car parts that would offer me the best protection for it. It was fun to put together a shopping list for the more serious upgrades like Insulated doors to fend off electrical strikes or off-road wheels that suited my erratic driving style. More than just functionality, once you face off against the wilds of the forest enough times, you’ll even be able to unlock the Detailing section of your Garage, which allows you to customise the look of your wagon. Hidden throughout derelict structures and ARDA backpacks, you’ll begin to encounter decals and ornamental objects that can zhuzh up your dashboard in amusing ways. You can decorate with bobbleheads, antennas, and stickers until your ride is just right – although, try not to get too upset when your freshly painted door gets ripped off as you tumble off a cliff edge.
Pacific Drive joins the eerie ranks of other Pacific Northwest psychological horrors like Twin Peaks and Alan Wake, harnessing the area's uncanny essence to chilling effect. The occasional sunlit drives offered little respite as heavy fog, suspicious neon flora, and towering tree shadows ensured I was always on edge and bracing for the next inclement anomaly. Finer details help enhance the mood even further, such as abandoned ARDA trailers coated in undulating goo, which often contain lost transmissions and interesting logs that help cement how lonely the Zone has become.
But while it can be appropriately moody, that lack of human interaction eventually took a toll, even with the intermittent and well-acted radio chatter I was receiving. As the grind for resources became more routine, I was begging for something or someone to break up the pattern of going out for resources, returning to make upgrades, and then repeating once again. It wasn’t long before I was giving out sentimental names to all the objects in the Garage as I pottered around sorting my inventory. The sentient item-belching dumpster out back? That’s Grover.
Anomalies have bizarrely fascinating looks that dare you to sneak a peek.
Thankfully, Pacific Drive’s monstrous Anomalies serve as its supporting cast, with bizarrely fascinating designs that dare you to sneak a peek. A siren’s call, if ever there was one, as the closer you move, the more at risk you become. One such baddie, the hovering Abductor, is made up of traffic lights and ooze, luring you in with a pale blue glow. Get too close, and the friendly blue turns to a deep red, as the Abductor chases and latches onto you or your car, dragging the unlucky party into all manner of perils and pitfalls. Rounding out the crew are explosive test dummies that follow you when you’re not looking, and patches of energy that impact your steering, often forcing you off the road, making for a rogues’ gallery with plenty of variety.
With such impressive worldbuilding, it’s a shame that the intimidating atmosphere can take a back seat to the sheer amount of plates you’ll need to spin. Vague mission objectives and awkward-to-find materials meant planning a story-progressing run was often fraught with unpredictability. One attempt at crossing through to the map’s Mid-Zone was so unexpectedly hazardous that I was too battered and quirked up for the return trip but the time I reached my quest objective. What should have been a simple saunter to the homeward gateway was too much to bear, and I lost all of my loot and progress for reasons that felt largely out of my control. As much as I relished the challenge, these half-baked aspects of Pacific Drive added undue annoyance on top of the otherwise well-realised and intentionally difficult systems.
Success can be so trying, but that does also make those hard-fought victories even sweeter. Full up on loot and lore, scraping your way out of a storm into the beckoning beam of light that teleports you home is an electric feeling, especially if you know that the work you managed to get done before your escape will have carved a path into an exciting new area. Resources, including even the basics, do tend to run thin, so returning unscathed from the brink of death warrants a proud dad-level pat on the back.
Unfortunately, the rinse-and-repeat nature of Pacific Drive’s midgame has an impact on the pacing of its story. It follows a trio of scientists grappling with work-life balance in a hallucinatory hellscape, which is an ambitious tale to graft onto a survival game, but the emotional beats didn’t hit as hard as I would have hoped. And ultimately, while it does answer some of the questions it proposes by the time the credits roll, it didn’t address the most interesting concepts that were swirling in my head as I played. Particularly, Pacific Drive ends in a way that felt tied to the trappings of the survival genre rather than honouring the world it had built up over the 20-plus hours it took me to reach its climactic finale.
Continue reading...
