Pacific Drive

If Car Mechanic Simulator, Grand Turismo, and Tales from the Loop had a baby...

SPOILER ALERT: This review contains spoilers.

It is in the pitch dark in the depths of a swamp of corrosive acid that I know despair.

In You Died: The Dark Souls Companion, Keza MacDonald describes the misery he experienced in the eponymous game when he got stuck at the bottom of the Ash Lake level.

"Every time I tried to make the journey back up the hollow tree that leads down there from the putrid swamp at the bottom of Blighttown, a basilisk would drop on my head and curse me again," said MacDonald. "I nearly broke a controller in half during this lengthy episode. I have never felt so defeated by anything, sitting there at that bonfire in that vast expanse of grey ash with my pathetic sliver of a health bar, after my fourth or firth failed attempt to escape. I thought I would never see the sky again."

As I fumble through the blackness, my way lit by a sputtering traffic flare, I think I know how MacDonald felt.

Admittedly, mistakes were made.

Pacific Drive is a rogue-like crafting first person driving/walking game, where you are an anonymous driver who has become trapped in a region called the Olympic Exclusion Zone which is located somewhere near Seattle. To try to get out, you drive around a station wagon from the 1980's to complete different objectives. The game uses a "task list" objective system, which is visible in the upper right hand side of the screen at all times.

When the game objective was to build something called a LIM Shield, I instead ventured to a newly opened level (the "Old Wall") to do some light scouting. Up to this point in the game, for most levels, you could leave the level by grabbing these objects called "Anchors" which you then feed into a device in the station wagon to open "gateways", which are apocalyptic-looking transportation zones which zip you back to your home base, a garage located somewhere safe in the Exclusion Zone. I figured I'd do some light scouting, see what was what in the new level, and then zip back to the garage by driving open and driving to a gateway.

It turns that that is not possible on the Old Wall level, at least, not before you build the LIM shield. There are (perhaps in retrospect not surprisingly) a bunch of old walls that stop you from being to access the gateways. After struggling to try to drive my station wagon up a steep slope to try to get around the wall, my health failing, my car being torn apart by the hell scape around me, a wave of killing radiation envelopes me, destroying my car and killing me. I am transported back to the garage, but with none of the precious materials I collected and with most of my car destroyed.

That is not the moment of despair though. No, that is reserved for when I have rebuilt my car piece by piece and now have a LIM shield in my trunk, as instructed, and am on my way back to the Old Wall level to try again.

In the game there are "quirks", which are car malfunctions, where for example the wipers turn on when you turn on the radio, or more dangerously, all the doors fall off if you turn on the lights. At this point some interaction from the "quirks" in my vehicle means that I can't get the front right door to remain shut; every time I shut it it just opens again, so I am forced to just drive with it open until I can get back to the garage to get if fixed.

In an intermediate level between the starting point and the Old Wall level, I turn off the road into a swamp to avoid hitting some horrible thing, only to find that the water I drive into is pure acid, and proceeds to eat right through my car, destroying most it and all my fuel. And then the battery dies, and I'd left in the dark, trying to figure out what to do. By the light of a traffic flair, I try desperately for a few minutes to find parts to slap together to fix my vehicle enough that I can drive it anywhere, but eventually I'm dead and back at the garage, with a car which I can't even drive into the bay.

From that point of dark despair, I rallied. I learned out how to use the route planner to avoid ending up in levels I couldn't handle yet. I paid attention to the "conditions", like Corrosive Waterways, the one which turns puddles into acid. I figured out how to live in the Zone, at least long enough to beat the game. And I loved it.

I love the item descriptions, the anomalies, the clever bits of lore embedded stream about the levels. I love the clever car themed names for some of the "anomalies" you encounter in the game. Exploding statues that appear when out of nowhere whenever you look away are called "bystanders". Floating rocks in the middle of the road are called "potholes". Giant pillars of earth that randomly rise out of the ground are called "bollards".

I love the fun interactions that are available. If you throw an object it can't process to the upgraded matter deconstructor, it throws it through the basketball hoop. The voice acting is lovely, and the story decent if unremarkable.

With the exception of throwing/shooting flares at exploding statues, the vast majority of "enemies" in the game can't be shot or damaged in anyway, at least as far as I can tell. This is not a FPS with puzzle solving aspects; it is thoroughly an exploring driving game with crafting/car repair elements.

And it is fantastic. As a child of the 80s, one of my favorite things to do in in this game is to take a drive at night in the rain. It brings back fond memories of falling asleep in the back of my dads station wagon and him carrying me to my bed after a long drive. The game is full of nostalgia or anemoia depending on your age; it's a wonderful mix of old technology and sci-fi speculation.

I love how Pacific Drive evokes a feeling that there are mysteries out in the Exclusion Zone that are yet to be solved, even after you finish the game. Part of that is because there are so very many lore pieces you are likely to not have gotten them all before you finish the game, leading to a reason to continue playing. Part of that is due to in game lore which leaves open-ended whether the game actually has certain elements (big foot  being one of them) actually in the game. Part of it is the sci-fi backdrop and the "hints" the narrative characters drop about mysteries they've encountered which you haven't seen yet.

My only quibbles are that some of the major story elements remain unresolved at the end of the game. Your character starts their journey making a delivery to somewhere in the Exclusion Zone before things go sideways. What were you delivering and who hired you to deliver it remains unresolved. Also, a bit part your characters motivation is to get out of the Exclusion Zone, but even at the end of the game, you can't actually leave. There is a never a cut scene where you drive out of the Zone.

On a more practical level, there are no sorting options in the UI for some of the "storage" options for items, leaving you to manually read through what becomes 100+ item listings if you want to find something you need. I would have expected that the "upgrades" would allow for easier organization and item retrieval and searching, not worse.

But these are small elements in what otherwise was the novelist game I've played in years, one I would highly recommend to anyone looking for a break from another run-of-the-mill shooter.