(Ironwood Studios Image) Pacific Drive is a survival game where your car’s survival is more important than yours. You’ve ended up stuck in an isolated
Pacific Drive is a survival game where your car’s survival is more important than yours. You’ve ended up stuck in an isolated part of the Olympic Peninsula where reality’s coming apart at the seams, and you won’t get out of it alive without wheels. That requires you to scrounge through what’s left of the local towns for gas, scrap, and spare parts, all while the local fabric of space-time turns itself inside out to stop you.
I’m about 12 hours into Pacific Drive at time of writing, and what impresses me the most about it is what it doesn’t do. I’ve lost count of the survival games I’ve played in the last few years that took their inspiration from zombie movies or Mad Max, where you spend most of your time fighting people over limited resources. It’s not so much a survival game as a shooter where everyone’s in rags.
Pacific Drive, by comparison, has no combat to speak of. It’s just you, your station wagon, and a few voices on the radio, up against a hostile, unpredictable environment.
Initially announced in June 2022 at Sony’s State of Play, Pacific Drive is the debut project from Seattle-based game developer Ironwood Studios. Its team includes multiple long-time veterans of the U.S. games industry, with experience working at Oculus, Riot Games, Sucker Punch, Insomniac, and 343 Industries.
In Pacific Drive’s alternate reality, the Olympic Peninsula became a test site for a new type of technology in the 1940s. In 1955, after an unknown disaster, the U.S. government walled off the entire site and left it to rot. By 1998, the area is known as the Olympic Exclusion Zone.
You play Pacific Drive as a delivery driver who gets too close to the Zone’s wall and is pulled inside. Shortly afterward, you discover a station wagon that somehow still runs, and use it to get to relative safety. Now equipped with what might be the last working automobile in the Zone, you team up with a few surviving scientists to try to find a way back out.
Your headquarters is an auto shop in a relatively safe area, but it doesn’t have any spare parts to speak of.
