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This STALKER-style drive into the Pacific Northwest is the coolest survival game I’ve played in ages

2K View2024-02-07

Pacific Drive

8.1

SurvivalActionFirst-PersonRacing

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SHOULD I PLAY PACIFIC DRIVE?

Definitely play this game if you’re into paranormal settings, looting and crafting, or if you just like the idea of driving around in a car you have to build and maintain on your own. Pacific Drive has been the number one indie on my list since I saw the first trailer last year. Now that I’ve played through the Steam Next Fest demo, I’m champing at the bit to get back in the driver’s seat of my beat-up station wagon and explore further into the Olympic Exclusion Zone.

TIME PLAYED

I played about an hour and a half of Pacific Drive, which took me through the introduction and first story mission and to the end of the demo. The first mission involved learning the basic gameplay loop, which consisted of selecting a route, setting out in my beat-up station wagon, and stopping at points along the road to clear obstacles and salvage materials I could use to repair my car and make new components for my base. I also built several new parts for the car, including some upgraded body panels, a rear bumper, and some trunk storage.

WHAT’S AWESOME ABOUT PACIFIC DRIVE?

• The connection with the car. I’ve played a lot of driving games. I’ve even yammered on at length about how much I love the scrappy DIY energy of rally racing games. But nothing I’ve played to date has given me the sense of being in an actual working car that Pacific Drive did. I had to be conscious of the car itself at all times: Parts of it broke down, tires went flat, and headlights were smashed out, and all those things required me to get out and do repairs myself. As tedious as it might sound to have to stop the car, manually put it in park, and shut the engine off every time I wanted to fix something, I found that the process served to keep me acutely aware of my car’s physical presence, and the overall effect was a genuinely unique sense of immersion.

• Smart inventory and crafting system. Pacific Drive required some inventory management, in that I had to have room in my pack and in my trunk for all the stuff I picked up while I was out on a run. Once I got back to the garage, however, my crafting bench automatically pulled from all the nearby sources when I wanted to make something—in other words, I didn’t have to do a bunch of annoying item Tetris to make sure I had the correct materials on my character before I could build the thing I wanted to make, I could use everything in my car, nearby lockers, and my backpack right at the bench. For the love of everything holy, I hope this becomes the standard in survival games of the future.

• The Pacific Northwest. The constantly shifting Olympic Exclusion Zone is a fantastic setting and almost a character in its own right. Pacific Drive showcased much of the region’s natural beauty, which is dominated by steep mountains that are densely forested with evergreen trees and constantly blanketed with rain and fog. A lot of my time driving was spent navigating switchbacks cut into mountainsides—at least, when I wasn’t flooring it off-road to reach my extraction point.

• Just the right level of creepy. This may be a surprise if you’ve been watching the trailers, but I don’t think Pacific Drive is actually a horror game. It does, however, have a kind of eeriness to it that’s tuned just right for me. I always felt eager to explore, but also cautious and a little nervous about what I might encounter next. I first saw a Bollard anomaly out of the corner of my eye while I was ripping panels off a wrecked car: something was emerging from the ground itself, and by the time I looked back, it had tucked itself away again. A group of Tourists—creepy crash test dummies—were arranged holding hands in lines of four or five near a gas station as I approached, and I wasn’t sure if they were the ashen forms of people who’d been incinerated or something else. I love not knowing what a game is going to throw at me next, and Pacific Drive kept me guessing for the entire run.

WHAT NEEDS IMPROVEMENT IN PACIFIC DRIVE?

• Weird controller mapping. I struggled with the default control scheme in Pacific Drive, which had commands mapped to the bumper buttons and triggers that I kept getting mixed up. A lot of the inputs are context-sensitive too, so it wasn’t enough to simply commit them to memory—I had to know when to use the right trigger on an object, and when to use the A button instead. I’m sure this will get easier with time and familiarity, but my only complaint from my time with the demo was that buttons kept producing unexpected results and the layout was less intuitive than it might have been.