Pacific Drive

"I swear you wanted me dead."

As a college student and growing adult I have to perform my daily tasks in order to get through life. Study for upcoming quizzes and tests, make sure I get to my class on time, work a part-time job, and grab a good bite every now and then so I don’t starve to death. I have to travel between a lot of places and like many of you it requires driving. I remember my first few days when it came to learning how to drive. A rough experience as you can expect. Paying attention to oncoming traffic, knowing what to do at every road sign and intersection, and then personal knowledge like what streets you shouldn’t take. What’s the best time to leave to avoid traffic, the construction in your hometown, and learning to multi-task while driving. I also had a parent alongside me who tried to show me the ways of the road, and unfortunately it was not a humble experience for me. Thankfully I did get better with time and two years later during my fourth year of high school I obtained my driver’s license. I could go anywhere I wanted as long as I drove safely. I continued to drive from place to place alone, and with each drive I got better. Something I once hated soon turned into something I loved. One of my favorite things to do now is drive. Take a trip and bask in the glory of the countryside and forests I live by. I’m not those folks who are overly attached to their cars and show it off like a trophy wife. All I care about is the journey.

I opened the review up like this as today’s game is all about driving, sort of. In 2019, a team of independent developers opened up Ironwood Studios. Planning what their upcoming title should be about and how to best encapture a vision of it. Game development is hard as well all know, and creating a game that is good and original is even harder. That was until Cassandra Drescott, creative director of Ironwood, took a trip up to the Olympic Peninsula in Washington. Drescott drove through the Olympic Peninsula taking in all the beauty and was inspired to create a game that could capture the feeling she had. Originally she wanted to make the project all by herself, but eventually hired a team of devs to help. Henceforth the creation of Ironwood. Work on the game pushed onward despite the downsides brought upon with the Covid pandemic, and in 2022 the team announced the title of their debut game. Pacific Drive, a journey through a supernatural version of the Olympic Peninsula inspired by the likes of Roadside Picnic and a lil of the S.T.A.L.K.E.R series. These two aren’t exactly listed as inspirations for the game, but a lot of people say Pacific Drive is heavily reminiscent of them. Which makes you wonder if they did serve as inspirations for the game. There would also be incorporation of roguelike elements as the team wanted every drive through the world of Pacific Drive to feel different and unique.

Two years pass and the entirety of Pacific Drive releases to divisive results. I’d put this game in the category of titles like Rain World or Darkwood in that you either click with them or don’t. A good handful of people loved what Pacific Drive was aiming for. Atmosphere, gameplay depth, and an adventure defined by player experience rather than a scripted narrative. Even though there was a story alongside Pacific Drive. Another good handful of people thought the game was okay or not as good as it was hyped up to be. It’s a game with a niche concept. Its definition of fun is going to be different from other games’ definition of fun. I was debating whether or not to buy Pacific Drive last year. On one hand the idea sounded awesome in my head, but there was the fear that I’d drop it after ten hours. It wasn’t until this summer that I finally bought the game, and just a few hours ago as of writing this I rolled credits. Pacific Drive is a good game. It’s a really good game! I loved my time with it despite the flaws and a few frustrating moments. Everything clicked the way it needed to, and as a debut title for an independent studio they managed to get a lot right on their first attempt. I’ll be thinking about this game a lot for years to come, but unlike a lot of indies before, my recommendation of Pacific Drive is gonna be tricky. 

On one hand it does what it does excellently. On the other hand, again, not a lot of people will vibe with what this game is doing. Our perception of art is subjective, but at the same time I feel we should respect the visions of artists. This is a good vision, and I’m very excited to talk to you all about it today. Let’s talk about Pacific Drive and why I vibed with it.

Story

"The gallow. Hanged by a thread."

The year is 1998. You’re a driver making a delivery to their next stop. The road you usually take is blocked off due to construction, and instead of turning around you decide to improvise. Seeing another alongside the road you drive down it. Ignoring the signs telling you to not venture down it. Outside your window is a massive wall. Encasing a chunk of the former Olympic Peninsula, or what is now known as the Olympic Exclusion Zone. Dozens of years ago government agents and scientists were sent to the zone to study its anomalies. Strange occurrences that rose out of nowhere. They wanted to harness and contain the power of these anomalies. Store them within objects for future use, and see what they could do. However, something went wrong with their experiments. It turned the once peaceful peninsula into an unstable hellscape. Reality could fall apart at any second and reform in the next. Scientists and residents of the zone were told to leave. Evacuate as soon as possible even if it meant leaving all personal belongings behind. A great stone wall was then constructed around the zone. To prevent anyone from the outside world from getting in easily. Very few individuals stood behind in the zone, and you are about to be the first person to enter ever since that disastrous day. Your car shuts down as you travel along your alternate route, and a black hole forms alongside your vehicle. Sucking you in and transporting you inside the zone. You wake up to find strange activities around you.

You navigate a temporary car in an abandoned shed and are then instructed by a radio chatter to drive to a nearby garage. As you drive you hear two other voices. Shocked to find out someone like you could manage to get in. These three voices are former scientists who worked for ARDA before the company was shut down. Tobias Barlow, Francis Cooke, and Oppy, otherwise Ophelia Turner. They stayed behind in the zone for personal reasons, but what they all share in common is wanting to understand what happened in the zone. Oppy tells you to find her old garage and establish a base of operation. The three individuals studied Remnants. Objects with supernatural ties and capabilities, and unfortunately the car you found was one of the Remnants. It tied its soul to you, and you need to find a way to sever it. These three will help you uncover roads deeper into the zone, the lost research of ARDA, why they were the only ones to stay, and learn why it went down the way it did. 

Gameplay

"Never thought that things would go this far."

Pacific Drive is three types of games crammed into one. A driving game, roguelike, and survival game. Before you depart on each journey you start out in the garage. Here you can craft any and all resources you may need, fill up on gas, recharge the car battery, and unlock upgrades. Once you’re done you plan what route you want to take, get in your car, and head out onto the road. Your main means of travel is of course the car, and your car is gonna be a mess at first. Barely any protection, missing components, and quirks that seem ignorable at first but turn into huge problems with time. Crashing into things or having hazardous elements hit the car will damage components, and a component’s health falls beneath a certain threshold it breaks. Forging new car parts out in the field is hard, or is impossible using your car workbench alone. That’s why it is so important to prepare back at your homebase, or craft what you need beforehand. If not then you’re gonna have to improvise. Along your journey there’s several locations you can stop at. Abandoned houses, junkyards, and trailers that once belonged to ARDA. Using personal tools you can scavenge these places for resources you need to craft. Some resources and doorways can only be opened or torn apart with specific tools. You need a Scrapper to shred steel plating into scrap metal. You need an Impact Hammer to shatter an electric glass container. 

Sometimes when your car breaks down it needs certain kits to fix certain things. For example, you need a sealing kit to fix a flat tire or cracked window. Again, it’s all about preparation and improvisation. As you progress further into the zone the conditions of each area changes. You’ll encounter different kinds of anomalies and natural events, and you have to learn how to deal with them. Acid rain, thunderstorms, geysers bursting from the ground, sentient droids, etc. To end a run you must collect enough Anchors. These are power cores scattered through each segment of the world, and pulling them out from their harness place causes something to happen. A stable anchor might not do much, but an unstable anchor might cause more chaotic activities to happen around you. Once enough anchors are collected you may activate an exit within given areas. You must be a certain distance away from an exit to work, and once activated you have to get to it as fast as possible.The world begins falling apart around you, and a red field encloses. If you are caught within the red field you start taking damage quickly, and if you die whether from the red field or our occurrences you’re taken back to the garage. Losing a large chunk of supplies you’ve gathered and your car in a complete wreck. Hence the roguelike elements of the game. If you do manage to come back safely you keep everything you have collected. That’s why it’s important you prepare so that each expedition is a success that’ll net you a plethora of rewards. As you get better at the game you’ll forge stronger devices for your car, identify quirks, fix them, and make it further into the zone. Drive to survive.

Thoughts

"Never thought that things would get this hard."

I want to offer the most balanced review for Pacific Drive as I can. I want to address why it may not click for a lot of players, but why someone liked me vibed like jelly with the game. This is one of the hardest recommendations I’ve given in a long ass time, but now it comes with love and respect for what Ironwood Studios have made. Pacific Drive is flawed and superb. I would carefully consider whether this game is or isn’t for you. If so then you’re gonna have an amazing time just like me. It does everything it wants to do well, and I was addicted until the moment I’d finally rolled credits. Most of my admiration for this game is from the game design and setting alone. We’ll talk about the story later, but overall Pacific Drive is a mainly gameplay driven title. You scavenge, you drive, and you survive as the slogan on the cover of the game goes. You do this for twenty to twenty five hours, and as boring as that sounds I loved it. The stationwagon you get is an absolute piece of sh*t when you obtain it. I think there’s a reason why they make you go through a short driving sequence at the start of the game before plotting you into the part that actually matters. Your car at the beginning is perfect. Handles well, doesn’t fall apart upon hitting the slightest bump or wall, and is easy to control. Then you get this thing which leans to the left when you try to drive, is missing a door, and one door pops open whenever you park.

It sucks, but it follows a philosophy game like Metroid does. You start the player off powerful as a way of showcasing to them what they’ll be like by the end of the game. They won’t be 100% like the starting vehicle, but it is an idea to keep in their head. Then kick them to rock bottom and have them work their way up. Doing busy work to reforge missing components to their current vehicle. Learning the quirks and what tools to make to forge or gather what they need. Once they have the car in a better state then start having them outfit the car with better equipment. Stronger platting, extra gas canisters, or powers they can activate with certain parts. Your vehicle at the start of Pacific Drive will be incredibly different from the endgame, and it rocks. It’s a nice way of showing how far you’ve progressed and all that experience you gained led to a creation only you could’ve achieved. I made a simple car with steel plating and two extra gas canisters. I saw a video of a guy whose car flew across the map like the car at the end of Back To The Future, and how they were able to get to that state was stunning. It’s not just player progression which gets better with time. It’s also their knowledge of the world and how to handle everything. Different anomalies, hazards, and driving safely and efficiently. Your car will take damage no matter what. I have never ended a run where a part needed to be fixed or replaced. Half the problems caused from unsafe driving or the anomalies roaming about. You learn to avoid them so that with each run you have less stuff to repair, or make stronger protection.

The atmosphere of Pacific Drive is the top. The zone isn’t exactly open ended like a majority of open world games out there. You have open areas, but each segment of the world is one you have to travel to. Much like how a majority of roguelikes have paths and choices, but railroad you to a specific boss or ending. Yet, it still feels like you’re exploring a vast world and that’s due to the pretty good pacing and the atmosphere. I’ve never played a S.T.A.L.K.E.R game before. I’m quite terrified to give them a go due to their harsh difficulty and playerbase. However, from what I’ve seen I love the atmosphere of them and Pacific Drive has it. You really feel like you’re alone. No one is coming to help you. Everything must be done by yourself and the only people who can help you are three bodiless voices on the radio. You drive down the road seeing what was left behind by the people who used to live here. Abandoned homes, wrecked cars, research which was left behind, and occasional environmental storytelling. Telling you ARDA wasn’t exactly a great company and they did more harm than actual good. Nothing original as this has been seen in dozens of science fiction and alternate reality stories before, but it’s done very well here. You combine this alongside the immersive engaging gameplay loop you end up with a world that’ll suck you in. A world that eggs you on to traverse deeper into this hellhole. Not just so you can hope you’ll escape or find its secrets, but because you want to see if you can do it. Can you finish a task no one from before has ever managed to achieve? Can you achieve the impossible? 

There’s a lot of other things I love about Pacific Drive so I’ll quickly highlight them before we get into more of my criticisms. It’s on the upper end of the spectrum when it comes to graphics in indie games, and the game looks really good. It surprises me how Ironwood were able to do this when most start out studios usually do something small and easy to make. Sound design is great and I love how the car has a built in radio. With licensed music Ironwood was able to get from numerous indie musicians. These songs are awesome and fit the one of the game very well. One of which I have saved to a music playlist, I Swear Your Wanted Me Dead from A Shell in A Pit. The same people who did the Wandersong soundtrack, and you know it’s probably one of my new favorite video game songs now. A calm first half you play when slowly driving down the road, silence for when you’re activating an exit, and a loud uproar when you’re gunning it to the safe zone. Even by itself it’s a good song, because it talks about a failed relationship and all the questions that arise as to why it failed in the first place. Whose at fault and who they are now. Sorry to ramble about music for a bit. Those are my hearty praises for the game, so let’s talk about some of my criticisms. Pacific Drive is an amazing game that combines survival elements with roguelike design. If you go in only for the roguelike half you might be a bit disappointed. 

It’s gonna be a long while before you obtain your first successful run. There’s smaller runs where you just do an objective and get back to the garage, but a complete run is when you exit through the final area of the game. This is a twenty to thirty hour game depending on how you decide to play it. Those who want to rush aren’t gonna have a good time, because the survival elements reward those who play safely and patiently. Even though there’s a magical dumpster that gives you stuff to make repairing a wrecked car from failed runs easier, Pacific Drive is not afraid to punish players. As you lose all your hard work from failure and burn through kept resources from what you lost. There were a couple portions in this game where I was getting ready to rage quit. A few missions have you turn off a destabilizer which then activates a random exit. When this happened one time I had to part my car faraway due to it being across a river and on a hill. I then realized the exit activated, I had to run to my car, try to get there, and failed. Then I learned I had to drive back to where I was and do it again. There was another failed attempt and then I was able to do it. Then there was this other time I needed crystals to forge an upgrade I needed to get further into the zone. These crystals can only be obtained from what is literally hell on earth. Where nothing but acid explodes from the earth and rains from the sky. Where there is nowhere safe to park as my car or I am always taking damage. Three failed runs and eventually I got the crystals I needed to forge the upgrade forward. If the game was cruel I’d quit here.

The game doesn’t have enough variety to make it a good roguelike you want to play for hours. Around hour fifteen is when I started to see aspects of Pacific Drive repeat. Areas and pathways that look the same, or areas that don’t restructure themselves as they’re important to the story and need to offer a strict and specific challenge. The way you fix quirks is fun. You have to guess what the quirk is by filling in four blanks, and once you get it right you have to use a specific tool or resource to fix it. Quirks are identified by just playing. Noticing them and jotting them in your head or a notebook. Whereas simple problems only require one simple tool, so this helps freshen things up. Especially with how new quirks are added in overtime once you fix old quirks. However, I don’t like how you only get eight guesses. Once you use them all up you have to go on another run before you get more. This sucks, but thankfully the game does allow you to save in your garage. So just save beforehand and reload if you knew what it was and was one answer off. Finally I want to talk about the story, because it has less of a focus than the gameplay. I do personally feel like it’s a crucial part of this game. The story is fantastic. I was mixed on having been told through voices on a radio, but the way it presents itself and reveals more with time is intriguing. Oppy, Francis, and Tobias are interesting characters and learning why they decided to stay behind in the zone gets you emotionally attached to them. Learning about their past loves, passions, dreams, and regrets is what makes them feel like real people.

I love it when game characters are written like human beings. That they just exist in that world. Nothing more or less. The lore of the Olympic Exclusion Zone is interesting and I paid attention to everything I could find. All of it’s done really well and there’s a good beginning, middle, and end to signal transitions to important stages of the game. Learning the zone, mastering the zone, and finally fulfilling the last few wishes of this research team. It’s great, but what if I were to tell you it’s kinda disappointing as well. I do not like the ending of Pacific Drive. I do not want to spoil what happens because in some ways it’s still great, but the way it answers past questions and all you helped work towards is mind boggling. As in it doesn’t do anything, at all. You never escape the zone. You never learn what theories are true, false, or answers to them. It’s all up to interpretation, and while I love stories with open interpretation this is one I feel needed a little bit more of it. Seeing how so much was building up towards the end and the answers. This isn’t a cosmic horror game where you’re dazzled by what is not understandable. This is a science fiction game that’s supposed to explore and answer the unknown, and it doesn’t. The ending was an epic bombastic gameplay conclusion, but from a story perspective it’s not very good.

Pacific Drive is a superb game. Heck, it’s one of my favorite indie games in quite a bit. Rating it right now I’d give it a 9.5/10 despite everything I had just said. One of the best 9.5/10 games I’ve played. It’s flawed, but what it does is done really well and I will never see a game like it ever again. At first I thought it was S.T.A.L.K.E.R but remove the guns and add in all the driving you do in the Far Cry games. It even reminded me of Death Stranding and Outer Wilds at times. By the end I knew it was more than that, and I’m saddened more people won’t check out this great, wonderfully made game. I am hopeful for whatever projects Ironwood Studios make next as their first attempt was brilliant. If Pacific Drive looks somewhat interesting to you please give it a go. We need more experimental games like this. We need to take that pacific drive. Thank you Ironwood for the experience.

9.5/10, Superb