If a game were judged solely on the emotions its premise, mechanics, structure, and presentation could generate, Pacific Drive would not only rank among the best games of the year, but join the ranks of many other indie games as a relatively minor undertaking Evidence of the room’s immense creativity. Exploring the so-called Olympic Exclusion Zone in your trusty station wagon is a subtle experience where you can never count on anything and the tactile nature of controlling every variable will really blow your mind.
But unfortunately, atmosphere isn’t everything, or if it were, it could be achieved and sustained in other ways, and this is where Pacific Drive’s lack of technical polish and slightly uneven survival mechanics start to wear off.
Let’s start from the beginning. Pacific Drive takes place in our world, but with one key difference: A few years ago, somewhere in the Pacific Northwest of North America (think parts of Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia) some kind of Anomalies. It was a geographical, biological and completely incomprehensible event that introduced a phenomenon with a radius of over 100 kilometers and, in true Annihalation fashion (seriously, watch that movie), transformed the animals, plants, the land we walk on and us The air you breathe becomes interesting, unpredictable and varied. Humans decided to study this area, but the end result was too uneven and strange, and instead decided to encapsulate the phenomenon with domes hundreds of meters high, leaving some behind the walls.
This is where you get sucked in for no reason, and the few survivors in the area decide to account for your escape. This can only be achieved by taking an old station wagon, a real American family car from the 1970s, and turning it into a tool that can illustrate the phenomenon you chart in the area and ultimately escape.
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I spent a little more time here than usual setting up the scene, but maybe that’s just to make sure you realize how effective the whole setup is, and how efficiently and seamlessly the game sets the scene. From a more practical standpoint, the game is a slight mix of different elements we’ve seen before. The game is played from a first-person perspective, and from a base, which also happens to be your workshop, you embark on an adventure in a relatively large open area…well, area. Here, you gather resources, avoid hostile situations, escape to the workshop to make necessary repairs, upgrade your car, and eventually expand the workshop with new tools, allowing you to delve deeper into the area, where more serious dangers lurk.
So, yeah, a little roguelite, a little survival, a little crafting – it’s all here, and you’re lucky enough to keep an overview of your resources, save up for crucial upgrades, while sometimes being thrown into the public eye by the game’s various malevolent phenomena Under the car, having to return to the workshop with a smashed car and lacking critical resources for even the most basic repairs.
However, the game does manage to structure your experience with obvious goals, so while you’re free to explore selected parts of an area and collect resources in one go, there are specific sub-goals to achieve, such as reaching a certain part of an area Or interact with an object. It’s all put together very neatly, and although the game lacks a more coherent narrative structure and therefore more emotional moments, it manages, much like Firewatch, to make the most of not having any characters in the picture. However, depriving players of their own voice is a real mistake.
The coolest thing about it, though, is how tactile it feels. Everything in Pacific Drive requires input. Putting the car in D or P, turning on the wipers when it rains, turning on the lights when it gets dark, taking off the broken wheel and putting on a new one – it all requires you to be there, present, and contribute to a A loop characterized by basic but satisfying tasks.
So what’s the problem? Solid atmosphere, good premises, good structure for survival? As with many projects, it’s the little things. Firstly, the technical state of the game, at least on PS5, is poor, with framerates typically running at 30fps, but it also features drops to 20fps, which is completely unacceptable. Also, it’s nice to have such a tactile involvement with repairs, but the whole routine, the set of rules behind the buttons, is so confusing that it took me a few days to get familiar with the whole setup. In the end, it’s all a bit uneven. It requires too many resources for general upgrades, the nights are a little too long, depriving you of some very basic visibility to get a general idea of what’s going on, and some of the phenomena seem unfair to players A sting, not a solid challenge that can be overcome or avoided.
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In other words, Pacific Drive is probably a QA review or two away from being ready for prime time, which is a real shame when the developer is allegedly launching the game during one of the busiest months of the year, especially on PS5. I don’t know why, but it seems especially inappropriate when the game’s main issues have to do with fine-tuning, balancing, and technical improvements – all of which could have been achieved with a few months of extra development time.
However, this also means that, even if I gave it a 7 today, Pacific Drive could become something special one day, becoming one of those wonderful indie darlings that really put the studio on the map. Keep an eye out for it because this idea is so cool.
