Eurogamer’s review of Pacific Drive, a punishing, anxiety-inducing game with an oddly lovable loop.
The other day I read an old interview with Hidetaka Miyazaki, the FromSoftware director behind Dark Souls and Elden Ring, and it seems particularly relevant here. “I’m a huge masochist, so when I make games like these… this is how I want to be treated,” he said. “‘I want to be killed this way!’ That’s how I make it! It’s just that sometimes other people don’t understand it; it’s for my pleasure.” His interviewer interjects: “Really? You want to be killed deep in the forest, getting punched by a huge mushroom?”
“Yes, yes. And the curse area… When I get cursed–”
Interviewer: “You want to die from a barrage of arrows?!”
Miyazaki: “It’s gratifying. I like that, I just wanted to emphasise it!”
Hidetaka Miyazaki would love Pacific Drive. On my roadbound quest into the heart of this game’s cursed and recalcitrant Zone I’ve been battered, smashed and crashed. Zapped, snagged, blasted with radiation, lobbed into a ditch, fired into a tree and also, more than once, lightly bonked on the head by my own car’s boot when trying to close it.
The difference here, in the relentlessly damp Pacific Northwest, is that it’s actually quite rare any of these lead to a proper death; instead it’s the preface to a heavily bruised return to your little safehouse of a garage, where you shake out pockets full of hastily extracted shrapnel, patch yourself up, patch your car up, and go back out there for another round. Somehow, that feels even more masochistic than death by barrage of arrows: it’s an elective pulverisation you get to live out over and over again. Survival only ever a function of escape, never triumph. And unlike Miyazaki-san and his taste for mushroom-bludgeoning, I’m yet to decide for certain whether I actually enjoy it.
All of this, I have to stress, is absolutely intentional. Pacific Drive is ostensibly a loot-and-craft survival game, laced with a bit of environmental horror – but it’s also a comedy, not unlike the way FromSoftware’s games are inescapably funny, or more recently Helldivers 2. And it’s also, in some ways, a kind of Roguelike – a structure that’s essential for its best moments but also at the heart of some of its struggles.
While driving around the lovely forests, somewhat inexplicably close to the fabled Zone, a long-evacuated government experimentation ground surrounded by warning signs, an air of impending doom and a big, 300-metre wall, you suddenly find yourself zapped inside. Things start getting a little weird, as they tend to do here, and your only means of escape is via the one strangely functioning car nearby, at the direction of a few Zone-curious oddballs who pick up your single and send one-way directions over the radio. They get you to the safehouse – a garage maintained by a wizened and excessively blunt disembodied voice called Oppy, which serves as your base. From here, you must venture out on scavenger hunts for radio antennas, reconnaissance missions and above all, raw materials, from which you craft more resilient wheels and door-panels and headlights that allow you to venture further – to gather more, to venture further, and you know the rest, the end goal being your escape, and maybe a bit of classic mystery solving along the way.
The first handful of runs – you can either follow the main story to specific areas or explore other ones for resources or nuggets of lore – will be brutal. Pacific Drive has a deluge of systems, all bolted on somewhat excessively, much the same as your side floodlights and spare fuel tank and roof rack storage compartment will be to your knackered old estate car as you get further into things. At first they’re overwhelming.
