Not to start our Pacific Drive review by leaping right into the sicko shit of it all, but for as long as I can remember, I’ve absolutely loved the distinct sound of gravel crunching under a tyre.
I know you know the one, so don’t give me that look: a car slowly pulling into a driveway or turning across a bit of dirt road, each inch moved ahead, producing a crack and pop of small, indistinguishable rocks being compressed under the weight of machinery and rubber. It’s an ASMR thing for the ages, just without the kink element (I hope). Pacific Drive is a game made for the freaks who get this.
For developers Ironwood Studios, it’s become something of a running gag to try and describe exactly what Pacific Drive is. Frankly, I sympathise; a strange fusion of survival-sim, car-sim, and vibe-sim, this first-person pseudo-horror game is an unruly amalgamation of inspiration confutations. At first glance, you’d imagine it would be easy to peg it. A stylised Northwest Americana setting, familiar crafting systems, spooky things that go bump in the woods, and the promise of the open road. In practice, Pacific Drive is far less knowable. A system-heavy, meticulously crafted sci-fi adventure that pulls from obscure genre fiction and the innate satisfaction of physical tactility, there’s far more churning away under the hood than you’d think.
Wait, so what is it then?
You play as a Breacher, someone who has managed to penetrate the outer wall of the Olympic Exclusion Zone, a sizeable chunk of American wilderness undergoing a mysterious and dangerous corruption process. Trapped on the inside of the OEZ, you quickly find yourself enlisted by a small ensemble of weirdos on the radio, all of whom are particularly concerned with your car. A shabby station wagon you stumbled upon when first arriving in the zone, you soon learn that you’ve found yourself metaphysically linked to the old family mover, itself a byproduct of the zone’s influences known as a Remnant. With the assistance of a former ARDA scientist and her abandoned garage, you’ll need to gather, craft, and explore the OEZ to find a way out and potentially unravel the mysteries behind this cursed stretch of land.
If you think I just loaded you up with too many proper nouns and premise jargon, then you’ll know how it feels to play the first half hour of Pacific Drive. Despite its immediately evident vibes and stellar atmosphere work, Pacific Drive is not all that interested in keeping quiet. With a solid cast of performances (flowers for Tara Langella’s turn as the curmudgeonly charming Oppy) and a keen eye for considered worldbuilding with just the right dash of irreverence, Pacific Drive immediately dispels any notions of a traditional, isolationist survival experience. This takes some getting used to, but once you tune into the game’s frequency, it’s hard to imagine the OEZ without it.
This isn’t to say you won’t find your downtime. The game expertly balances the pacing between narrative, systems, and player-driven immersion. This is largely thanks to its semi-open structure, each exploratory run into the OEZ being a somewhat bespoke rogue-like experience you’ll chart on a map before leaving your base of operations. These interconnected routes and junctions are subject to procedural generation by way of OEZ changes, each section of the map explorable in your car before arriving at the edge of a zone and transitioning to the next. It turns the OEZ into digestible, uniquely flavoured bites that are better seasoned the deeper you venture.
Cool, but what about the car?
Aside from some run-of-the-mill tasks and lore dumps given by your cohort of Zoners (they don’t call themselves that, but I do), your time in these spaces is a methodical, strangely beautiful window of free-roaming. Ideally, you’ll need to break into abandoned homes and structures, pillaging rusted car husks and zone-warped tech along the way, for a litany of crafting materials, but you’re just as likely to find joy in the simple act of driving through the impossibly thick mise-en-scène.
That indefinable pleasure from the crunch of gravel under tyres, the mechanical clicks of wipers and gearshifts, it’s all deeply ingrained in Pacific Drive, the game requiring manual use of any car functions every time you want to drive. This direct, often finicky, relationship with the car is a necessary building block for the game as your vehicle serves as transport, protector, and pet. It drives the way you’d imagine an aging station wagon would through muddy roads and potentially supernatural phenomena, but if you take care of it, it takes care of you.
There are loads of upgrades you can slap onto this thing, from the basics of better panelling and storage to paintjobs, to some truly absurd but extremely cool special abilities. You belong to each other. Pacific Drive gives you the systems and tools to feel ownership over the car just as it spins a tale of how the car feels ownership over you.
The zone itself is striking, a delicate blend of compelling and repelling that rewards your curiosity as often as it punishes. The game’s abstracted smudginess and harsh lighting give the Pacific Northwest landscape an idealised glow, the way you’d imagine this kind of American imagery if remembered through a dream. Countless times I had small moments catch my breath, like stumbling upon a derelict farmhouse in the middle of a stormy night, my headlights cutting the building out from the dark around it. Elsewhere, my battery died, and I found myself gingerly rolling through a haunting, colossal interior by the scarce light allowed in from cracks in the ceiling high above. There are endless examples of Pacific Drive’s immersive visual storytelling, and so much of its charm will be entirely dependent on what memories, impressions, and fears you bring to it.
Gotcha, but if I’m not a “sicko”, is Pacific Drive for me?
Pacific Drive’s roads aren’t without some bumps, of course. Your tolerance for survival/crafting systems may reach its limit in the garage, a home base that can be upgraded over time with new tech for better materials refinement and whatnot. It’s a charming little car hole, but between the baseline crafting, blueprint modulating, and car quirk recognition software (your car develops personality ticks, naturally), the vibes of the game are a little nullified by one too many systems. Likewise, the UI is a fascinating experiment in aesthetics over practicality, as though someone took whatever Starfield was trying to do with its rudimentary techno-futurism and actually made it cool. I like it, even if I had to stop and double-check my inputs and choices more times than I can count.
Still, I’m so glad Pacific Drive exists. Even more so considering the push Sony are making for it, putting this strange and unwieldy beast of an experience in front of as many players as possible. It has such simple, unabashed joy in its pervasive tactility, a perfect extrapolation of the satisfaction of making machinery churn and systems click. And that’s to say nothing of its killer selection of radio tunes; listening to an obscure folk track as I raced my car toward a giant beam of annihilating light was just fucking great. It’s certainly not going to be for everyone, a little too cumbersome and a little too long, but for others, Pacific Drive will be their ride or die.
Review conducted on PC with an early access code provided by the publisher.
Pacific Drive launches on February 22 at 12:00 AM AEDT. Find it on the PlayStation Store here. Find it on Steam here.
Image: Ironwood Studio, Kotaku Australia
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