Pacific Drive, the post-apocalyptic first-person driving survival game where your car is your lifeline, is already charting among the top-selling games on Steam by revenue over a month before its release.
Developed by Seattle-based developer Ironwood Studios, Pacific Drive is currently available for presale only. Previews from outlets (including Kotaku Australia, which you can read here) came out only a few days ago and, so far, first impressions are looking pretty positive for the indie studio’s debut title. Our preview, written by David Smith, says 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.”
If you’re curious to know more about Pacific Drive, the driving survival game puts you in the shoes of a character venturing through the Olympic Exclusion Zone in a “surreal reimagining” of the American Pacific Northwest. Your old station wagon is your only companion as you make your way through the abandoned woods to find answers about twisted experiments that have left anomalies in their wake – all the while trying to survive, keep your car in one piece, and outrun the Zone Storms that threaten to obliterate anything in their path.
While a major portion of Pacific Drive is focused on the circumstances you find yourself in, and the surreal Zone and the dangers that lurk in the shadows, it’s also steeped firmly in a dizzying level of modularity when it comes to both driving and maintaining your car. As David mentioned in his preview, driving in Pacific Drive is more than just jumping in the car and pressing a button to accelerate or brake – you’ve got about as many moving parts to getting your station wagon through the Zone as you would in real life. By extension, there’s plenty of moving parts to be broken – either by the dangers of the Zone, general wear and tear, or the radiation permeating the woods – and fixed with resources and parts scavenged along the road.
Some users online have described the game as one immersive sim fans are sure to love given how granular it gets, but it’s not just the sim fans who are getting behind Pacific Drive. Survival horror and sci-fi fans alike are hyping up the title, and based on the positive response to early access streams on services like Twitch, Ironwood Studios’ game is in pole position when it launches on Steam on 22 February.
Image: Ironwood Studios
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