Pacific Drive is a new game that’s basically Stalker… with a station wagon. And brother, lemme tell ya, you’re gonna love the way you look in this wagon.

This beauty’s gonna be your lifeblood as you explore the mysterious post-apocalypse (??) of the Pacific Northwest, raiding gas stations, research bases, and derelict shacks for everything from fabric scraps to plasma canisters, which you’re going to use to craft upgrades and repair kits for yourself, but more importantly - your car.

See, when you first start, your car’s going to be a piece of shit. You’ll be trying your best to drive through overgrown pacific forests on spare tires and hope, with your body panels literally being held together by duct tape. But as you go further and further on, you’ll be replacing these shoddy components with rugged off-road tires, armored bumpers, roof racks, literal jump-jets, and electric coils to blast off anything that might cling to your car.

Because that’s another thing - you’re not just moseying around out there in the forest and small towns with you and your car. You’re doing all that while dodging a heaping helping of anomalies - ranging from helpful repair critters to devastating buzz-saws and creepy exploding mannequins. These anomalies are well-and-good as you’re looting, but everything ramps up to 11 when it’s time to extract - by the way, did I mention this is an extraction looter? Anyways - when you’re extracting, you’re opening up a temporal portal to warp you back to homebase, and the new denizens of the forest don’t like that. So now, you’re on a timer, screaming over hills and ditches, down mountains, all the while trying to avoid anomalous ley lines that hurl you up into the sky if you touch them, or abducting machine-beasts that will try to steal your car with you inside of it. It’s a white-knuckled exciting thrill-ride that turns the slow methodical looting leading up to it on its head.

When you finally get back to base, you’ll be given a chance to use your hard-earned loot to upgrade your car, as mentioned, but you’ll also get the chance to diagnose some… quirks… that your car develops in the Zone. See, your car is sort of anomaly itself, so sometimes you’ll get little mechanics gremlins that are simple - everytime you shut your trunk, the car beeps. Small, endearing foibles that feel like honest-to-god quirks you’d expect from an old well-loved car. But then you’ll get more.. Anomalous quirks. Stuff like, whenever you turn on your windshield wiper your car jumps upwards into the air, or when you turn the steering wheel to the left, your gas pedal slams to the floor.

These quirks are probably my favorite system in the game, because they’re developing while you’re in the zone. So you could be three sectors deep into your run before realizing that whenever you turn your headlights on, your car shuts off - so you augment your behavior around that newfound quirk. The best part, is that a lot of the time you’re not going to immediately realize what’s occurred. You’re probably just going to think - huh, that’s weird, why does my car keep cutting off? That’s because in order to fix the issue, you need to actually diagnose it first. You need to know that, not only your car is shutting off, but WHY it’s shutting off - what action is triggering it.

I know I’ve spent a healthy portion of this short review raving about this system, but I genuinely think that it’s such an awesome way to tie the gameplay into the feeling of owning and keeping an old beater car running. You develop a real attachment to the car as you’re tinkering with it, painting it, and fixing it up when it starts to buckle. It’s a system that works waaay better than I was expecting it to, which is a good thing, because the game’s best qualities sorta stop and end with the car and your interactions with it.

Looting the abandoned buildings and research stations is pretty dull, to be honest. They’re the same buildings, and nothing really changes, except for where the toolboxes are. For huge portions of the game, there’s basically nothing to threaten you while you’re on foot, so you’re just doing busywork gathering materials before getting back to your car. And it’s fun for awhile, gathering stuff that you know is going to be pumped into meaningful upgrades. But the abstraction of materials to plastics, scrap metal, rubber, etc means that you’re kind of just making the numbers go up. It’s not a strictly bad thing, and it seems clear that the game is doing this to further its ambitions to create something that isn’t another extraction shooter, but some small part of me can’t help but pine after this with an extra layer of imm-sim shooter spread over it.

With that small quibble aside, I really can’t recommend Pacific Drive enough. It’s a fantastic game that had me one-more-running well into the night.

Merhaba öncelikle şunu söylemek istiyorum. Oyun süresi bir araba sürme simülatörü için çok uzun olmuş. Oyunu ilk fragmanı çıktığından beri takip ediyordum. Adamlar nedense hiçbir fragmanda bu fast travel sistemini bırakın göstermeyi göz kırpmamış bile amk. Oyunun full açık dünya olacağını tahmin etmiştim neyseki önyargılı bir insan olmadığımdan dolayı oyunu denemek istedim. Ve 5-6 saat akıp gitti. Oyunun zaten çok klişe bir hikayesi var. (Spoilersız) Radyodaki insanlar sana komut veriyor. Oyunun hikayesi yok yani sıfır ara sahne bir tane bile yok. Nedense oyun overrated bir şekilde çıkış yaptı. Halbuki çok söylenecek çok eleştirilecek yanı var. Neyse oyun tarihine bir balon daha girmiş oldu. Oynanırmı? ben vaktimi 16-17 saat boşa geçirmek isterim diyen varsa benim gibi salaklar oynayabilir.

Pacific Drive is the only craft-type game I've been able to chill with in the past half-decade.

Gathering resources isn't a slow and boring chore, it's an optimization problem. Blitzing through every zone as fast as possible while snagging supplies as you go feels like mapping a space in a way that's almost like an arena shooter.

The final stretch is a little wonky, and the narrative climax didn't hit for me - a very "wait, that's it? it's over?" sort of ending - but I'm glad I saw it through to the end.

If you enjoy "survival" games at all, you should absolutely take this paranormal station wagon for a spin.

I hate to shelve yet another game this year, but Pacific Drive’s somber tone, air of mystery and gameplay loop were fun at first, and quickly lost their charm and became tedious.

As far as gameplay goes, the real standout thing here is the tactility. Manual control is everything in Pacific Drive: you have to manually toggle the wipers, transmission, and the headlights, regularly refuel your car, recharge its battery and repair/replace every part of your station wagon’s outer shell. The replacements do have a tangible effect on gameplay, as well. A new set of wheels, or even just one of your old wheels getting loose or punctured have an effect on your car’s handling that is very much felt. The same tactility applies to out-of-the-car gameplay, too, though to a much lesser degree. You’re taught to disassemble everything and anything you come across in the Zone, but not every thing is interactable - far from it. Most doors are permanently locked, most anomalies are basically untouchable, and most of the tech in the zone is affixed to the floor.

The issue of limited freedom in general is the one you notice pretty much right away. The first minutes of Pacific Drive see you drive a car you can’t exit or modify, then you’re led through a string of highly directed tutorials where simple actions get introduced one at a time in a very limited environment. You literally are not able to do stuff like siphon fuel from a roadside wrecked car until you’re specifically told to by Oppy, at which point you’re finally allowed to do this very simple thing. This feeling of “there’s nothing to do until the game decides it’s time” persists well into the middle portion of your playthrough, at which point all illusions thoroughly break down and the game becomes predictable and simply boring. You settle into a routine: unlock some new recipes, repair/replace parts of the car, get on the road, go to a place, gather three thingamajigs to start a visually impressive but transparently non-threatening and directed sequence of doing a warthog escape through a portal, OR go through a gate on the other side of the area to do the previous routine in another place. Gathering supplies, avoiding anomalies and maintaining your car doesn’t change quickly enough: by the time I got to Mid-Zone I’ve already taken like 6 identical drives through the Outer layer, so it’s hard to be impressed by or interested in anything anymore. You know?

It’s a shame because I genuinely was starting to become invested in these kooky scientists’ past and present struggles, and if anything, the narrative and character work in this game are surprisingly decent. Too bad all you do is drive to a place and grind for new car parts!

Tentative 6/10, might change in the future

Not much to like here, atmosphere was ok. There's no actual fun/relaxation in the driving (it's actually slghtly infuriating) it just involves going a few metres slowly, avoiding obstacles, until you reach the next building/abandoned car to loot and then fast travelling to the next area of procedurally generated buildings that are copy pasted again. In theory if you wanted to avoid this tedium there are a good range of difficulty settings to remove damage, fuel etc (This removes your ability to unlock achievements if you care about that) but i believe you still have to loot for parts. Otherwise, the controls are strange but i think you can get used to it, can't comment on the story as i didn't stick with it for long but the voice acting seemed ok and finally, there are tons of bugs but i don't usually let it effect my ratings in the hopes they will be fixed over time as it is a new game.

You need to set your expectations right with this one to appreciate it. Pacific Drive is much more of a chill and occasionally spooky atmospheric looting/scrapping/crafting game with a focus on vehicle customization than it is a stalker-like or death stranding-like where death and danger are constant concerns. Initially I was disappointed by how loot-oriented it is, stopping your drive every 30 seconds to sift through a copy-paste interior with generic crafting mats is repetitive and not very interesting, but I eventually got into the flow of it. Moreso I feel the true letdown here is the anomalies: I think it would be gauche to want actual “monsters” - it’s not that sort of game, but the array of benign atmospheric hazards that comprise the bestiary here don’t really instill much tension in the gameplay; even in the final and supposedly most dangerous zone, there’s not much here that can’t be circumvented by just driving a little bit around it, and anomalies like “corrosive mist”, “shock mist” and “irradiated ground” just feel very uncreative considering they take up the same slots as tourists and wriggling wrecks that feel like genuine anomalies. The first time I got to the “Eerie Darkness” zone I was shitting myself at every random atmospheric noise, but once you come to the realisation that nothing is really out there and nothing will ever be there, the game kinda loses a lot of its mystique. Even from the perspective of the survival mechanics, the game is very easy - once you load your car up with reserve tanks and batteries, you’ll basically never run out of fuel or charge, and the result is that you can just gun it wherever without much regard for resource management in the lategame. In this sense I think it was a bad idea to make the game revolve around returning to a home base over and over - a continuous journey without free recharge/refuels could have introduced more long-term ramifications for bad decision-making, and it would have made me think about using all those oil barrels lying around that I never needed to touch or battery jumpers sitting in my trunk all game, and more linearity could have allowed some actual level design to be introduced into the game instead of endless proc-gen (it’s telling that the story missions that use preset layouts feel much more interesting than the proc-gen stuff).

Still, the atmosphere is so good in this game that I enjoyed it quite a bit, the driving mechanics are very well executed, and the quirk mechanic in particular is pretty genius; letting your car develop unique traits that further endear you to it, which is weaved in with the overarching narrative themes about obsession and letting go. I feel the whole narrative package would be a lot better if the ending was better though. [spoilers incoming!] I really thought the game was building up to a moment where you would have to sacrifice your own car, and I thought this would be really powerful. Every character in this game is wrestling with some sort of obsession that’s keeping them tied to the zone, and the game ends with Oppy overcoming hers and finally letting go of Allen’s death, and a very good parallel moment with the Driver needing to let go of their own car, which they’ve forged a connection with throughout the game, seemed like an obvious choice, but the game instead goes for a very video-gamey “you just unlocked Free Play mode!” ending where nothing really happens, which feels like it misses The Point in a narrative where letting go is the main theme.

Pretty cool game overall if you can take it for what it is, but I do think the same concept could be executed better, which I would like to see because the concept of this game is so good. In general I really like the “long haul through a hostile environment with gameplay revolving around logistics instead of combat” archetype and would love more games like it. Maybe I’m just looking forward to Death Stranding 2…

The idea of constantly repairing and improving your car while driving through dangerous territory is awesome, and this game executes it well. Everything is so tactile and requires you to manually move pieces throughout the world using your tools. (I actually think this game would be incredibly cool in VR for that reason.)

Unfortunately, the mechanics of maintaining your car are not enough for this game to stand on. The gameplay loop is interesting at first, as you collect the many different resources the game requires to craft different parts, but by a certain point you realize that the entire game requires you to drive somewhere, loot, repeat. The atmospheric horror starts out strong, but the lack of any real threat makes it forgettable by the end of the first act. Most of the anomalies are lacking in flair, like electric clouds or buzzsaw in the ground, and all of them are extremely easy to avoid once you understand how they work.

This game is missing something key, whether it be a tangible threat or another system stacked on top to make the car system work that much better. This system would work well if incorporated into an FPS or survival horror game with an actual monster chasing you. Imagine how much more terrifying a chase would be if your car suddenly decided to conk out, and you had less than a minute to fix it. I wanted to love this game but its just missing something key that's holding me back from diving into it.

It's like a less scary stalker experience with a car in it, featuring fun gameplay and progression. The pacing and storyline are genuinely intriguing throughout the journey. However, reaching the end, you realize that nothing significant unfolds. Instead of feeling a sense of accomplishment and perhaps a tinge of sadness that often accompanies completing a compelling game, you're left feeling disappointed. Despite its potential for a solid 4 perhaps a 4.5-star rating, I could only muster a 3.5 due to the lackluster finale.

Have played around 5h of this and I have to say it's a bit of a grind so far. No, it not even close to stalker. It's true that i has anomalies but that's about it. I am also not a fan of the aesthetics, the music or the feel of the characters (probably because I went in expecting something closer to slavic hell is other slavs and not this indie folk introspective isolation while a bunch of dudes I don't care about bicker on the radio).
Still, the game has obvious merits and I couldn't give it less than 3 stars with a good conscience. I might play it a bit more, or maybe I should wait into getting a new computer that can run modern stuff.

Pacific Drive is essentially Jalopy with more sauce. Starting out with this little shitcan strapped together with nothing but duct tape and a few prayers, you head out on a road trip into a beautiful depiction of the Olympic Peninsula.

I've personally driven those winding highways in a shitcan of my own - cruising through the pouring rain, the dreary morning barely lit by my shitty, clouded headlights; there's a very specific eeriness winding through those trees. Pacific Drive takes that innate emotion of the region and adds in legitimate paranormal threats and intrigue, the result is an incredibly compelling locale to base the core loop of the game.

Ducking into little shacks, scrounging for little bits of scrap, dodging the anomalies, racing towards the extraction, then heading back to the garage to upgrade the shitcan, my shitcan. Admittedly, Pacific Drive is often not exhilarating in its moment-to-moment gameplay, it's much more interested in building atmosphere as you crawl across the terrain. I doubt everyone will enjoy the gameplay here, and maybe I'm just too biased regarding the setting, but I'm overjoyed that a game like Pacific Drive exists. If you're a fan of titles like Jalopy, The Long Drive, or My Summer Car, do yourself a favor a give this one a try, I'm sure you'll fall in love.

I've never been a car person, never really adored long drives, but always found solace in them, and dammit if Pacific Drive doesn't just nail it. Your a survivalist, surviving basically hell, your best friend a run-down half-magical station wagon, and it is addicting as hell to play. While I was never to get into driving games generally, this one really caught my attention when I first saw it a year or two ago in the trailers, and I just really love it.

The gameplay aspects can be grindy and crazy sometimes, but this game really makes you connect with the car and enjoy your time with it too. Starting from a junk-heap and building it up as you explore doing everything from calm night-rain drives, to batsh-t crazy hydroplaning dodging anomalies, getting sparked by electric towers, and getting flipped by magic extending bits of earth. I'm really enjoying my time playing this, and while I write this before the end of the review, the story and the characters is secondary in my mind and the first time in a long time I tuned them out past the first few hours just to enjoy the drive. And even with my lack of car-care, there is something so unique and... nostalgic(?) about it all, like I'm a high school kid facing the world, great stuff.

Honestly, best experience so far in 2024 for games, and I'm looking forward to more, but this one will definitely stick in my memory for quite a while.

What’s killing Pacific Drive for me is that I find the loop pretty dull. There’s not much to driving, the procedural loot map stuff is really mind numbing. A lot of the difficulty from the later areas comes from the hazard modifiers, which are mostly turning the knobs up on radiation, damage taken etc. A well-kitted car doesn’t feel all that different to travel in, you’re just turning the knobs up on your car’s attributes to keep up. 10 hours in, I get in a big ol’ crash — this part of the game’s good, just reacting to hazards, messing up and paying for it — but as I think of the loop I’m gonna have to participate in to make up for it, how little it differs from the usual routine, how much I’ve already been avoiding the loot cycle, I think I’m good! There’s just nothing to break it up. The narrative’s pretty slow, propped up exclusively by one-sided conversations with performances that’d be more enjoyably hammy if they weren’t the only thing driving the story, which consequentially feels pretty thin — not that I needed more than “haunted wagon, haunted Washington” to check it out anyway. Killer mood, mood killer to play.

I'm so conflicted on this one. I was immediately convinced by the reviews that this was a game I wanted to play. The art style, the gameplay, the mysterious story. It reminded me of a combination of Subnautica and Outer Wilds in all the right ways. This game has the makings of a fantastic game and for the most part it is. It's just let down by a pretty lackluster story and tedious endgame with an ending that left me seriously disappointed.

I still think this is worth playing just for the early/mid game alone but I do hope they update the story or something because man that kind of killed it for me.

Very fun concept! Clear inspiration from Roadside Picnic/Stalker only with a beat up old woody station wagon as your best friend. The mechanic....mechanics aren't intrusive or too complicated so you don't have to be a car enthusiast to enjoy it, the car is very modular in that fashion (put the wheels on the rotors, put the engine in the engine bay etc). The world is fun to rip around and explore and the anomalies are varied and interesting to encounter. The only things that irked me is sometimes the writing doesnt always land but it isnt awful. Death can be quite punishing as theres no saving mid-run (you have to do a corpse run to get whatever shit you had in the trunk back.) Overall very relaxing ""rogue"" type game that succeeds in that feeling of falling in love with your piece of shit car!

It's...fine. At the start the game is great, fun characters, good looting system, gameplay loop is engaging but it gets repetetive really quickly and makes you care alot less about upgrades and looting to the point where i just didn't loot any houses in the last hours. The game makes it easier to survive with no looting thanks to the car in the garage that remakes itself every time and the friendy dumpster (my beloved), with that you have enough materials to survive but not enough to get the best upgrades which you don't need at all to be fair. It's a solid game that runs well (which is rare in theese days unfortunately) and doesn't stay too long to be tedious, it took me around 15 hours to beat the story with not alot of side looting.

Pacific Drive - I wanted to love you, but at the end of the road I just liked you.

First, the good - the atmosphere, story, and music are all top notch. I enjoyed learning the lore of the Zone and figuring out how the characters were related to what was going on. The sense of place was unparalleled, and while I played there were moments I really felt like I was driving around the woods of my home state. The music, largely performed by local WA artists, was great and reasonably varied.

However, the good was somewhat undercut by the bad. There came times when the story "paused" because I needed to do a few drives to gather materials in previously-visited zones, and during these times I found it much easier to notice little annoyances in the gameplay and graphics. I found that some, maybe even many, of the gameplay systems became tiresome when I had to grind resources to engage with them. The music, while great, was limited to only 15 tracks. Because of this, at the end of my 22-hour run I had heard every song numerous times, and I'd grown tired of most of them. The performance was only consistent in its inconsistency, and the fluctuating frame rate negatively impacted my immersion in an otherwise deeply atmospheric game.

Overall, the initial impression was strong. After the first hour I would have rated this game 5 stars. After 22 hours, the magic had faded (but not vanished!). I still loved the story (despite a slightly lackluster conclusion) and the immersion this game offered was great, but undercooked gameplay elements and lack of variety eventually dragged the game down for me.

I'd recommend this game to any Washington local, or to people who enjoy exploration-driven games and can forgive some clunkiness.

uma parte de mim morre toda vez que eu vejo um conceito muito maneiro sendo mal executado. esse jogo tinha praticamente tudo pra ser incrível, mas erra em algo que muitos erram: repetição.

a gameplay disso tem TANTA coisa legal... tantos preparativos maneiros que você faz. tudo desperdiçado em um loop de lootear em toda missão. basicamente você vai parar o carro de minuto em minuto pra explorar alguma coisa, pegar o loot e voltar pro carro. tudo isso pra melhorar e customizar o carro. o problema, caso você esteja se perguntando, é que é só isso. no sentido de ser básico. não é um loot maneiro de ser pegado, tlg? não é como se fosse um cenário belíssimo, um puzzle inteligente, algum stealthzinho sei lá... é igual esses jogos ae de mundo aberto. entra em um lugar genérico, pega o loot e vai embora. seu progresso inteiro gira entorno disso. ao menos o manegement do inventário é massa.

não vou dizer que não é uma ideia legal esse loop, longe disso, só acho que foi muito mal executada. um jogo incrível com uma proposta interessantíssima e com um dos controles mais satisfatórios de veículos que eu já joguei, travado atrás de um ciclo de gameplay muito repetitivo e chato.

recomendo que jogue mesmo assim, pq se isso não te incomodar, é um prato cheiasso e um dos melhores desse ano. só a vibe de dirigir nisso na chuvinha ouvindo as músicas fodásticas das rádios já vale a pena testar ao menos uma vez.

I generally enjoyed the game, but the gameplay loop did begin to get a bit stale towards the latter half of the game.

The atmosphere is great, the music is great, and slowly upgrading your car and base is fun. The story is just kinda there and the ending left a lot to be desired.

A pretty good first game for a studio, if a little rough around the edges.