I’ve played about four hours of Pacific Drive, and I think I must have spent around 30 just thinking about it afterwards.
Pacific Drive is the debut game from Seattle-based developer Ironwood Studios. It is a post-apocalyptic first-person survival game in which a beaten-up old station wagon is your everything. Your character is stuck inside the Olympic Exclusion Zone, a walled-off section of the heavily wooded American Pacific Northwest. The OEZ is a strange and haunted place, abandoned, left for nature (and whatever else lurks in the green) to reclaim for itself.
And you’re in there on your own.
This is why your car is so important. It is, quite literally, everything to you. It isn’t just your mode of transportation; it’s your home — a fortress, a mobile base of operations, a laboratory, a workshop, a storage cupboard, and an engineering project in its own right. It’s the car that won’t leave my head. It’s the part of the game I keep thinking about. Specifically, the clever ways that Ironwood has designed the car for the player to use. In most video games, driving a car is as simple as pressing the Y button to get in and holding down the right trigger to begin accelerating. In Pacific Drive, your car needs a little more attention than that. You’ll need to turn the ignition and then put the car in gear before you can start rolling.
This little ritual, transposed from the real world, grounds Pacific Drive in a subtle reality. The dash is littered with doodads to play with — your windshield wipers and lights are on the wheel stalks, right where they should be. You’ll need to watch your fuel and battery levels in case you need to stop and forage for one resource or another. If you’ve had a door ripped off the car in an accident, the Door Ajar light will come on as a reminder. The Slip alert light will come on when you start trying to press your car into service as a four-wheel drive, snaking up muddy embankments and praying for grip. I even encountered a moment where I needed to sprint back to the car to avoid a large, floating enemy, fumbling the ignition and fighting the gear shift in my panic.
All of this to say: Yes. Good. This is the good shit.
When you do get your car back to a garage, there’s plenty to upgrade. If you’ve found enough supplies and requisite parts, you can begin replacing its rusted, decaying bodywork. All five doors, front and rear bumpers, the headlights and tyres will need looking after. If you get a flat tyre, you’ll need to either find a way to patch the one you’ve got or scavenge a better-quality replacement from abandoned cars by the side of the road.
Outside the car lies the muddy, damp, gloomy woodland of the American north-east coast. You’ll make frequent stops to investigate abandoned houses, shops and industrial sites so you can pick through them for supplies. Personal inventory space is limited and requires some juggling to ensure you can take everything with you. Crafting can be completed in the garage or via a small mat in the boot of your car if you’re on the road. Every tool you create has a purpose but will require a non-trivial amount of resources. Some resources will need to be combined in-menu to complete specific builds.
Pacific Drive excels at communicating a sense of transgression — of trespassing in a place you know is dangerous. You shouldn’t be in the exclusion zone, and it’s not immediately clear why you are. All you know is that you need to scurry about in your little car and try to make the best of it. The zone itself will occasionally remind you of your place on its strange, unpleasant food chain.
So far, Pacific Drive feels like an extremely clever, entertaining riff on the survival genre. Though our demo only took me a few hours to blow through, those hours gave me a lot to think about in the days that followed. That’s always a good sign.
I look forward to playing more Pacific Drive when it launches on February 22 for PlayStation 5 and PC.
Preview code provided by the publisher.
Leave a Reply