A lot of successful survival games manage to find tension and horror through what can seem like completely normal settings on the surface. For example, withSubnautica,you have the unknowns terrors of the bottom of the ocean. WithGrounded,there’s the realization of just how menacing a backyard and its insect inhabitants can be when shrunken down. WithThe Forest,there’s…well, aside from the cannibals, it’s kind of right there in the name. But with their new game Pacific Drive, developers Ironwood Studios have been able to mine horror from one of the most terrifying, dread-inducing bits of everyday life: Having to constantly keep your old, crappy car maintained.
That may be a bit of a joke, but according to the developers, an old beat-up station wagon served as the main inspiration for Pacific Drive’s central mechanic. In order to survive the Olympic Exclusion Zone, a quarantined national park in the Pacific Northwest, you’ll have to keep your car fueled up, repair damaged sections with a blowtorch, scavenge for replacement parts and more. And even when driving the car, you have to perform basic actions such as turning the keys in the ignition, handling the parking brake, etc.
While it sounds like all of that could easily fall into the trap of becoming tedious due to a commitment to realism, the gameplay and controls in Pacific Drive are constructed so perfectly that realism never becomes a hindrance. Of course, it helps that outside of car maintenance, reality goes firmly out the window when exploring the Zone, with bizarre anomalies everywhere that pose some rather unique threats, and guarantee that you’ll be invested in hunting down the stories behind any weird experiments that went on in the area.
The demo that was on display did indeed feature a good chunk of this weirdness on display, as our protagonist had to set out to pick up three anchors and insert them into a device in our car. Noting the marked areas that contain anchors on the massive GPS by the passenger’s seat, I headed out to the closest one and got out, passing though gorgeous forest scenery before coming across bizarre mannequins, not to mention what appeared to be some floating rocks. I couldn’t stay long, though, because there was a dangerous level of radiation in the area that I had to watch out for. So after hunting around a bit and grabbing some supplies, I grabbed the anchor and bolted back to the car.
And that’s when it happened. My precious car had now come bolting down the hill towards me. Had it become possessed? Sentient? Was it merely a hallucination that…oh, I had left the parking brake on. Stupid me. Still, something had to get it to move even further, and that’s when I saw it. Some sort of weird, drill-like worm with metal bits was tunneling through the ground nearby. I couldn’t see all of it, but I had seen enough to know that I should get the hell out of there.
As it turned out, though, driving off-road in the Pacific Northwest in an old station wagon filled with electronics wasn’t easy. And I didn’t exactly have much time to figure out what a smoother route would be, as a Zone Storm was set to hit soon. So I touched it out, made it to another area with a second anchor, grabbed…and then saw three weird quasi-jellyfish creature floating in the air, hauling my car away with tendrils attached to it. The creatures in this game are a bizarre sight, but weirdly beautiful as well.
Not knowing how to stop them, though, all I could do was wait until the Zone Storm hit, and without all three anchors and a way to a safe location, the skies turned red a deluge of insane weather took me out…at least until I was ready to begin another run. Between its visuals and setting that mix the paranormal in with the serene and the nice level of challenge that the car-focused gameplay provided, Pacific Drive truly ended up wowing me, and with any luck, might just be the next big survival hit when it comes out later this year for PC and PS5.
