If My Summer Car and Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker were smashed together and turned into a video game, the result might be Pacific Drive. However, that doesn’t mean Ironwood Studios’s debut game is derivative in the slightest. Pacific Drive’s supernatural spin on survival rogue-likes is giving the genre a new coat of paint, and The Best War Games received hands-on access to a preview build of the game to show what it's all about. After three story missions spanning roughly four hours, we can happily say that we’re craving more.
Pacific Drive is tense, cryptic, and even scary at times, but it’s also laid-back, easy to understand, and filled with levity exactly when the moment needs it. Just in the first few moments, the demo encapsulates how Pacific Drive is a master of both worlds, as the opening credits describe the game's Olympic Exclusion Zone, an area in the Olympic Peninsula of Washington where the government conducted radioactive tests. What happened there remains a secret, and all who have attempted to breach the zone to find answers have never been found. The game’s mystery and atmosphere oozed from the start.
The demo puts players behind wheel for a sunny drive down a quiet road in Washington that began to turn grim, dark, and brooding, as the sky shifted into overcast, and the road became hazardous the closer the car got to the Zone. After a few bumps and scrapes and an encounter with an otherworldly portal leaves the player without a ride for a second, they find themselves in possession of a beaten-down station wagon with a broken headlight inside a rotting shed. From a cherry family road trip setting to an almost grindhouse scene, Pacific Drive does a great job of going from cheery to bleak in a matter of seconds.
Pacific Drive Puts the Car and the Zone at Center Stage
After getting in the driver’s seat, Pacific Drive demonstrates that it wants to do a little bit more with car mechanics than most other games, requiring manual switching between park and drive, manual windshield wipers - which do come in handy - and even the need for turning the key to start the ignition. Some of these systems seemed superfluous and hard to adjust to at first, but the moment the Zone started swallowing the play area while fiddling with the car, they made for a tense few moments.
As the player narrowly escapes the enclosing Zone, their radio companions Oppy and Tobias start bantering over the radio, setting the stage for what is Pacific Drive’s main story. Apparently, that old station wagon is much more than it seems to be as, Oppy and Tobias seem concerned that the newfound friend is likely a “Remnant.” Exactly what a “Remnant” is remains a mystery, but the player is warned that they are liable to cause insanity to whoever they attach themselves to.
When the beaten-down station wagon creaks into the shop, Pacific Drive offers its first primary objective: fix up this junker. A solid portion of Pacific Drive focuses on simply working on the station wagon at the auto-body shop, taking great care of ensuring the doors were patched up and looking nice, the side panels were fixed up and fortified, and making sure both headlights were operational for a night drive. Eventually, players should find themselves caring greatly for their once-scrappy station wagon, now slightly less scrappy and likely to the chagrin of Oppy and Tobias.
Pacific Drive Brings a Unique Style of World Building to Rogue-Likes
Pacific Drive’s structure is similar to a rogue-like, or “road-lite,” as the devs like to call it. The main objective of the game is to get out of the Zone, but that can only be accomplished by venturing into the supernatural unknown to gather resources and ensure that the station wagon can endure the Zone’s biggest obstacles. Each run in the preview begins at the rusty old body shop, where players can plan out their next route on a map filled with branching roads that gets bigger with exploration. But what was actually in the Zone was the game’s biggest surprise and where Pacific Drive is making its mark both in gameplay and emergent narrative.
It’s not what players can see that drives the tension in Pacific Drive as much as what they can’t see. During one excursion into the Zone, we took a pit stop at an abandoned shack in the search for loot, where we encountered a group of petrified people, clearly taken by the Zone. Pacific Drive’s visual world-building was on full display as the dirt and clay seemed to have taken these poor citizens long ago. It was an unsettling sight among the thick fog and quiet soundscape of the Olympic Exclusion Zone, only broken by the sound of rain, but the crowd seemed harmless enough that we decided to loot to our heart’s content.
In the middle of our rummaging and looting, we heard something shift directly behind us, immediately putting us on alert. Upon turning around, we saw the previously still group of people had now shifted positions but only slightly. More notably, there was a massive pillar of dirt raised in the middle of the lot that wasn't there previously. It took a second to register what had even happened, making us question if what we saw at first was even real or just something we didn't notice when we got there, but we turned back around to continue looting.
Only moments after turning our backs did the sound of shifting happen again, as if a second warning had been announced. Turning back around, the clay figures had moved, and the dirt monolith had shifted positions. With a shiver down our spines and unmistakably sure something was off here, we ran back to the car and fast-tracked it back to the road before something even worse came to find us.
In those moments of uncertainty and unseen terror, Pacific Drive impressed us with its emergent gameplay. There is a thick layer of supernatural horror enshrouding the already mysterious anomalies on the surface that makes every turn in the road just as tense as the last, because we never know what’s coming next. When a game can make a barrel in the middle of the road look about as menacing as any other number of strange supernatural horrors in the world, it’s doing something right. More impressively, however, Pacific Drive seems to be standing out significantly from its peers by making its gameplay loop more about the car and less about the player.
Pacific Drive Wants to Change Up the Survival Game Status Quo
Notably, there were very few traditional enemies in our demo of Pacific Drive. Throughout most of our time with the demo, the only real obstacles we encountered were the supernatural anomalies that littered each section of the zone, intended to make players crash or steer them away from the main objective. The Zone is home to all sorts of strange sci-fi and supernatural things meant to pummel the player’s car, such as sawblades skating on the road, targeting our wheels, or massive electrical traps meant to fry the station wagon’s battery. But sometimes, the challenge simply comes from a strong wind that catches the player at the right time and rams them into a nearby boulder.
Pacific Drive is all about out-maneuvering the anomalies in the zone through finesse and preparation and not so much about facing them head-on with a gun. So far, the game’s approach to a survival game with a low emphasis on traditional combat seems to be paying off because it always felt great to outsmart the Zone’s carefully laid traps due to our skill and preparation. However, while this was fun in the short term, it’s up to the full game to flesh out these systems for the long haul before they get stale. We’re excited to see how the game can evolve the premise.
Pacific Drive did have a small handful of issues in the preview build we were provided, which we hope the developers can clean up or rework in time for the full release. Notably, the UI is a bit clunky and scattered at times, making crafting a bit hard to wrap our heads around. Pacific Drive has a lot of systems at work and lots of things to craft, but it’s all crammed onto the screen in long lists and in small fonts, which makes sifting through the menus a bit of a struggle. The menus can feel especially clunky when players are in a rush to make a repair out in the zone before something comes along and kicks them while they're down.
Visual bugs and a few performance issues were also a bit of a sore spot in the preview, but it was nothing too egregious besides some flickering in reflections. It is worth mentioning that there was a bit of stutter reminiscent of PC shader compilation issues. Every time we found a new item or encountered a new type of anomaly, the game would stutter for a few milliseconds before it recovered but didn't pop up again when we found the same item later. Additionally, entering a new section of the Zone would sometimes see a few moments of stutter before it was smooth sailing once again. Eventually, these issues smoothed over the longer we played, but they were still present.
With just three main story missions to play, our time with Pacific Drive was short, but it left us excited about getting back into the Zone for its full release. Its unique approach to the rogue-like genre via car mechanics and logistics is making an effort to explore new gameplay systems outside the typical hack-and-slash or loot-and-shoot mechanics we’re familiar with. Meanwhile, its art direction and narrative are doing more than enough to get players excited about exploring each corner of its atmospheric setting.
Pacific Drive is shaping up to be a tense race against time and the unknown, punctuated by tranquil moments where it's just the player and their car getting ready to take on the world, and we’re excited to see how the full release builds upon such a solid foundation.
Pacific Drive releases on February 22, 2024, for PC and PS5. The Best War Games was provided a PC code for this preview.
Pacific Drive
- Released
- February 22, 2024
WHERE TO PLAY
Pacific Drive is a first-person driving survival game with your car as your only companion. Navigate a surreal reimagining of the Pacific Northwest, and face supernatural dangers as you venture into the Olympic Exclusion Zone. Each excursion into the wilderness brings unique and strange challenges as you restore and upgrade your car from an abandoned garage that acts as your home base. Gather precious resources and investigate what’s been left behind in the Zone; unravel a long-forgotten mystery while learning exactly what it takes to survive in this unpredictable, hostile environment.
DRIVE TO SURVIVE
It’s you and your station wagon against an unforgiving, vicious world. It’ll take more than a fresh set of tires to keep you alive, on and off the road. Your faithful wagon can be upgraded and reinforced to protect you, but the car is going to take a beating. Keep your gas tank filled and your panels intact to withstand the radiation permeating the Zone. You’ll be pushed to your limit - making repairs on the fly, scavenging materials wherever you can, and adapting your rolling fortress to tackle the many life-threatening dangers that lurk in the shadows.
- Platform(s)
- PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X, Xbox Series S
- Genre(s)
- Survival
