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A perfect mix of paranormal and mundane makes Pacific Drive my favorite survival crafting game

8K View2024-02-23

Pacific Drive

8.1

SurvivalActionFirst-PersonRacing

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SHOULD I PLAY PACIFIC DRIVE?

Pacific Drive won’t be everyone’s cup of tea, but if you’re at all interested in the solo side of survival crafting, or if you’re into weird fiction and spooky road trips, this is a game you should definitely check out. There’s something genuinely magical about Pacific Drive’s core loop of repairing your barely functioning station wagon, planning a trip, and heading out into the unknown wilds of the Pacific Northwest. Unlike most survival crafting games I’ve played, combat is not part of the experience here, but nonetheless it’s provided some of the most intense feelings of adventure that I’ve ever had in a roguelike or driving game.

TIME PLAYED

I played about five and a half hours of Pacific Drive, on top of the hour and a half I played of the Steam Next Fest demo. I arrived at the country repair shop that served as my base of operations and made four trips out into the Olympic Peninsula to gather crafting materials and key items to improve the garage and, eventually, allow me to escape the cordoned-off zone I was trapped in, where matter has a hard time retaining any specific shape for very long. I explored three of the nearby areas as I worked on upgrading my car with steel body panels and doors, unlocking new tech, and building new gizmos to help navigate the turbulent and often scary world I was trapped in.

WHAT’S AWESOME ABOUT PACIFIC DRIVE?

• The vibes are flawless. The developers of Pacific Drive set out to establish a very specific mood through the use of setting, art direction, music selection, and game mechanics, and I’m happy to report that they have absolutely nailed it. As I played, I became more and more attached to my homely wreck of a car, a family station wagon whose chipped paint, bald tires, and dented quarter panels all told stories about where I had been with it and what I’d had to do to get there. The music on the car radio ranged from wistful to eerie, but it all called my attention to the unknowable wilds I was driving through in the rugged mountain forests of Washington state.

• AM radio spookiness rather than outright horror. This is related to the previous point, but I wanted to call special attention to the way Pacific Drive’s atmosphere creates weirdness and eeriness without crossing the line into horror. Finding myself trapped in the walled-off Olympic Peninsula, where some Half-Life-style science experiment had ruptured the fabric of reality, I had to deal with all kinds of strange anomalies: “bunnies” made of scrap metal that bounded around and tried to attach to my car, flying abductors that prowled the woods, buzzsaw creatures that sliced anything in their path, and “sparker” towers that electrocuted me if I got close while hunting for precious plasma cells.

The thing is, none of these phenomena are intentionally hostile. They’re not “enemies” in the traditional sense, they’re just natural hazards—a new class of dangerous elements of nature, in addition to the bears, sheer cliffs, and extreme temperatures I would have normally found in the Washington wilderness. And because of how Pacific Drive is all about gathering resources in order to survive and press farther forward into the zone, instead of being horrified by these anomalies, I was instead curious to know more about them. I wanted to understand what they did and why they appeared, how I could work around them without causing a disturbance.

It’s a scary game at times, and I had some definite white-knuckle moments trying to get my car to the glowing exit portal in time as the radioactive storm closed in, but I never felt like I was being purposefully terrorized. It’s a bit like Bigfoot: Sure, it’s supposed to be a scary monster, sort of, but the main thing about Bigfoot is that everyone wants to see one.

• The most rewarding crafting system I’ve ever used. Generally speaking, I’m pretty tired of crafting mechanics, but Pacific Drive reminded me that the concept can still be a lot of fun. I loved that everything I made had a purpose, and I could see it doing its little job, whether it was a new set of off-road tires or an advanced device to set up in the garage. Knowing I had just put new steel body panels on my ride made me want to hop out and patch them up after I scraped trees and guardrails as I hurried to the exit, and I was always on the lookout for rubber to make sure I could put together a spare tire in an emergency.

• The driving feels amazing. No, driving around off-road in the rust bucket Pacific Drive gave me wasn’t “awesome” the way it is to peel out in a Bugatti Chiron in Forza Motorsport, but I’ll be damned if I didn’t feel more like I was actually driving a real nuts-and-bolts car in Pacific Drive. Part of it was down to how intentional I had to be about mundane actions like putting the car into gear, shutting the doors, and turning the key in the ignition. I also had to look over to my right to consult my map, and make sure I was scanning back and forth in order to spot threats. I also worried a lot about going over rough terrain or scraping obstacles, because I knew everything I broke was something I’d have to fix later in the shop. Having driven around in a big 1984 Ford Crown Victoria as a teenager, I found my Pacific Drive car extremely convincing.

WHAT SUCKS ABOUT PACIFIC DRIVE?

• Disappearing inventory items. All my complaints about Pacific Drive are relatively minor, but one of the bigger problems is that my stuff periodically went missing. I’d make a new impact hammer for my next run, but sometimes if I saved my game and exited, the new tool would be gone when I loaded back in. In a game with such a heavy emphasis on foraging and crafting items for survival, it’s crucial to be able to rely on things being where you left them.

• Checklists sometimes don’t update. Similar to the inventory issue, I sometimes found that my pre-trip maintenance checklist failed to update. In one case, it kept telling me that I had three out of four tires in good condition, even after I had removed and replaced every wheel on my car with brand new ones.