Releasing on February 22, 2024, Pacific Drive is looking to do something different with survival and crafting games, making a station wagon the player's lifeline.
Pacific Drive’s opening hours were rife with familiarity. A strange sensation considering I’ve never before played a game where a station wagon is driven through a freakishly distorted Pacific Northwest.
There was, of course, echoes of Control’s dalliances with ordinary objects possessing otherworldly properties.
Half-Life’s disastrous resonance cascade reminded me of the realities of the Olympic Exclusion Zone bleeding together.
Days Gone’s attachment to a vehicle. Back to the Future’s wacky Delorean. The Last of Us’ harrowing forests. Minecraft and its gleeful dismantling and reconstruction of everything in sight.
Yet the wholly original meat of Pacific Drive looks to shirk any peer comparison by implementing commonalities in a package that truly has no equal.
My journey with developer Ironwood Studios’ first game comprised a handful of introductory missions and the opportunity to roam the strange roads of Pacific Drive. Is this truly a game where survival is conducted from the driver’s seat of an old station wagon?
Based on what has been shown of the game so far, I came into Pacific Drive expecting a kind of roguelike/crafting/survival game that emphasized complex vehicular customization. And based on the five-ish hours I played of this preview build, those assumptions were moderately correct. What I think may actually surprise people interested in the game is the amount of intricate storytelling involved in the game, especially in the front-loaded narrative.
Ominously opening with text fade-ins, Pacific Drive imagines a United States of America where a phenomenon known as the Olympic Exclusion Zone was established in the Olympic Peninsula of Washington State. Some kind of advanced technology or experimentation took place inside the Zone, justifying the construction of a massive, hundreds-feet high wall around the perimeter. But it’s 1998, so why are objects cropping up with dates decades in the past? Why has the Zone gone dark for so long?
As a hapless person seemingly making a delivery to the outer rim of the Zone, players are suddenly transported inside the walls after the landscape seemingly underwent a change. Was it radioactive? Alien? Manmade? Whatever the answer, two voices buzz on a radio referring to the players as a “breacher” that needs to escape a cataclysmic incursion causing gravity to abandon its rules and the terrain to glow.
Radio chatter comes fast and loose in Pacific Drive and it is initially chaotic to follow. Players stumble upon a car and quickly learn it is a “remnant”, or a normal thing that can latch itself onto a person providing both protection from the phenomena inside the Zone and potentially driving the user insane. Even in the first hour where you meet most of the primary cast, I had trouble remembering the how and the why. That feeling was exacerbated by the growing list of items, recipes, and lore bits I could investigate and analyze.
It was a lot. Especially when going into the game’s menu and scanning over the sheer volume of tabs and unread items I was staring at.
However, it’s important to think of the context all this is delivered in. The world of Pacific Drive is not meant to be normal by any means and most of the items and objects have a small tidbit of text adding flavor to them. As for the speedy narrative delivery, the game slots away every audio conversation in a portion of the menu to be played again. Right before diving into this written preview, I went back and read over all the text that wasn’t just focused on the main story but on the stranger pieces of the world I had been clued in on.
Knowing that my time with Pacific Drive was limited–and that my save file wouldn’t be preserved–I wasn’t as thorough as I would have been on a normal playthrough. After a few dozen times scanning literally everything from tires to plasma tanks to oozing dumpsters to glowing anomalies resulted in another offering of this world. This is where those echoes of Control and the Oldest House came into play. Flavor texts offer up a short transmission or story from unknown people that may only be one or two sentences. Maybe they are dated from the past. Or they offer unrelated information from the item scanned.
In these opening hours, players will be able to glean that the world of Pacific Drive teeters on the brink of collapse… or at least the player’s life does. Chunks of the road literally rise up like asphalt monoliths. Electricity crackles and arcs from parasitic blobs. Particles swirl around abandoned towns where a huge levitating entity has broken everything in sight. It’s all very fascinating and I truly wonder where it is all going.
My fear with Pacific Drive’s narrative is that like many crafting and survival games, the pace of the evocative story beats will come to a halt as players are forced to scrounge up new materials for extended runs. It’s happened to me several times in other games when idling in a familiar area to stockpile items before moving on to a harder zone. What will make Pacific Drive any different?
One solution may come from the frequent radio transmissions that weren’t adjacent to the main narrative. These crackled in when wandering around the world or driving its dangerous worlds and provided a number of eyebrow-raising moments. Again, though, trying to digest the content of these broadcasts might be problematic during loud and tense situations. But based on what is being hinted at, Pacific Drive’s lore of the Olympic Exclusion Zone and the voices trying to guide you through it has a great amount of potential to be a satisfying, engaging mystery.
The core of Pacific Drive’s gameplay revolves around players exploring the Olympic Exclusion Zone to collect materials meant to enhance the clunky station wagon that will hopefully drive them out of danger.
Such a seemingly simple conceit grows in complexity as the number of blueprints and possibilities discovered within an hour take hold. It was fairly important to take a moment to breathe when parsing through the number of stations and points of interest at the main garage which acts as the hub before runs. It’s here that players do the most obvious of maintenance to their station wagon. A fuel pump gives the car the gas it needs to drive. The battery can be charged to allow advanced features to function. A weird dumpster outside can be investigated that will literally spit out crafting materials.
A noble attempt is made to have everything in Pacific Drive make enough sense in the context of the world. Most oddities can be explained away because that’s just how the Olympic Exclusion Zone is. It allows your car to have a pocket for a fuel can that squelches when you pull it away. It allows players to seek out “anchor” energy that is used for upgrades but also activates teleportation beams that scramble the particles of the car and the player character back to the garage.
Survival game sensibilities are grounded in “real world” limitations but have a fun twist. Car panels, doors, and bumpers are constructed out of plastics, metal, and duct tape. Those things can be scrapped from junked cars on the side of the road or found in numerous buildings along a route.
During my preview period, I spent a good deal of time searching for the list of possibilities that would eventually open up as I found more complex materials and unlocked new upgrades for the garage. The economy of Pacific Drive seems to be relatively robust and the amount required to craft is also quite fair. As the game progresses, players will have permanent blueprint unlocks and special features that enable extended survival in harsher conditions.
Scavenging for materials requires players to get out of their car and often interact with various hazards across the world that may pop up when delving into an abandoned building. Starting out there’s a scrapper that can dismantle objects like cars, an impact hammer that can bash through doors and glass, and a prybar to get into trunks. It took me a bit of time to streamline my effectiveness at accessing and organizing my inventory but there’s a few hotkeys that give quick access to important tools. There’s a certain fear I have of trying to balance picking up everything and being smart about a relatively generous inventory size.
And I am so thankful Ironwood Studios equips players with convenient options to store all their trash. This is due to the fact that Pacific Drive‘s world is violently hazardous to both the player and the station wagon. Player’s plan out their route at the garage using a map that identifies how much fuel it will take to get there, the type of weather and conditions to expect, and a number of other factors. During my preview I veered off the beaten path a few times to experience what kind of “modifiers” I might expect out of this storm. Steam pockets would break through the asphalt, launching the car in the air. Electrical energy would track me down or electric barriers would magically appear and block my path. These tiny bomb-like parasites would attach to the car and drain its battery or floating heaps of scrap would attach a magnet and drag me along helplessly.
At first, the station wagon is insanely flimsy. Crude panels and bumpers barely keep radiations from leaking in and affecting the player. Tires can be punctured with ease. Fuel has to infrequently be siphoned from other cars. Thankfully there’s a crafting station and literal cardboard boxes that can be installed in the trunk to hold items and make objects on the fly.
These strange touches make Pacific Drive feel more unique. Repair paste is literally slapped on to the hood and it glows and covers the car as it cleans up damage. Eventually, electric batteries and steel parts increase durability and reduce the need for constant maintenance.
When taking up the driver’s seat, there’s a lot to take in. Typical features of a car like an odometer and a fuel gauge are present. But displays also indicate power levels, damage to individual parts of the station wagon’s body, special powers and items equipped; a mini-map is riding shotgun as well.
Acclimating yourself to the deeper mechanics of the car is essential and fairly grounded in realism. On its base settings, Pacific Drive initially requires players to put the car in park or drive and turn the ignition key to start it. Get out on a hill and forget to put it in park? Expect gravity to take its toll. Requiring gas isn’t as painful as it may sound because the tank doesn’t burn through fuel rapidly… however idling the engine and going out on extended scavenging trips can be costly.
Driving is meant to feel a tiny bit frustrating in the initial stretch of Pacific Drive. I understood that as being an indication of a goal to work towards. Spinning out on muddy roads or taking a turn too fast feels awful. But you’re operating an ancient vehicle that is barely hanging on. Equipping the car with a wheel or a panel that isn’t labelled “crude” instantly makes a difference. But other factors like heavy rains and dark environments are going to emphasize good headlights and always turning on those wipers.
I remember a distinct moment of panic when I was being chased by a blue electric force. In a panic, I began reversing only to crash into a boulder. This isn’t an arcade racer where cars can fully impact a wall at 90mph and still stand. I got flustered at the damage my car had already taken from small trees and radiation spikes. “How do I get back on the road?” I asked myself? Then I remembered my side and rear-view mirrors. Obviously I had to look at them or rotate my camera directly behind me like I was actually driving.
Pacific Drive can be visually busy with how much is going on behind the wheel. Players need to be able to multitask by looking at what’s ahead, what’s behind, and what’s all around the car. Because the visuals don’t skew towards complete realism, it makes it easy for players to know what to look at. Bright colors, while beautiful, are often objects of interest if stationary or harmful if moving. But if there’s one impressive thing I’ve noticed so far, it’s the sheer amount of particles flying on screen at once. Coupled with environmental affects, the fast movement of the car, and the ground literally splitting open, Pacific Drive is a work horse that will put your PC to task.
My big question about Pacific Drive when shifting into full release is how all these systems will continue to build onto each other to maintain player engagement. The story undoubtedly has its hooks in me so far but I worry about those empty stretches. Will the power creep of new car parts and upgrades make me truly invested in the survival of my station wagon? Despite taking place in the Pacific Northwest, are there going to be enough weird things twisting the world to make new routes interesting to explore?
So far, there’s an immense amount of promise in this eccentric survival game and it seems like Ironwood Studios knows what it’s doing. We’ll know for sure when Pacific Drive releases on February 22, 2024.
