Preview: Pacific Drive Steers Toward Transcending the Survival Games Genre

The best survival games are the ones that get overrun by details. They’re the ones that have so many elements to take care of that a player can get lost just trying to keep track of all of them. That might not sound appealing, but for a game like Pacific Drive, where you have to take care of your car in the middle of a high-tech apocalypse that’s out to kill you, it’ll only be a good thing.

This upcoming title from Ironwood Studios was one of my most anticipated when I saw its description earlier this year. Colleagues of mine had also relayed that it had everything I love in a video game: a mysterious sci-fi world, an eerie atmosphere, roguelite elements, and, most importantly for me, a lot of looting.

I’m not the biggest fan of driving in games, so I was concerned that how you spend most of the time in your car would detract from my enjoyment. Either way, when I saw there would be a preview at PAX East this year I signed up for an appointment immediately. And it did not disappoint.

There’s a lot going on in Pacific Drive, even in just the 15 minutes or so I spent on the PAX East demo. You’re tasked with driving through what’s called the Olympic Exclusion Zone looking for what are called stable anchors. But first you must fix up your car: a wood-paneled station wagon that’s covered in rust and is missing important parts like doors and tires. You can take care of the outside with a blowtorch and easily put the tire back on. Huge upgrades fall from the sky through a portal that you can also attach to the top or inside of your car, but I attached one to my roof and got into the driver’s seat. A 15-minute countdown timer in the top left corner told me I was running out of time, although not before checking out what crafting materials I could pick up in the rundown gas station nearby.

The setting provides a great visual and gameplay-centric contrast. On one hand, you have your trusty, decades-old station wagon. You need to fill up the gas tank, turn the key in the ignition, and put the car into drive before even beginning your journey — properly old school. On the other, you have alien-like, high-tech obstacles getting in your way, breaking up what would probably be a normally peaceful, scenic Pacific Northwest forest. It makes you feel like you’re out of your depth, especially as you get bombarded with radiation, enemy tech, acid, or any number of unknown hurdles. Sure, you can drive your car into a charging station and get zapped with electricity, but you’re still just one person in a world where there are no other humans in sight (although you can talk with people on the radio).

You can start by driving on the road, following the in-car map interface to get to your destination, but you’ll come across various strange anomalies blocking your way. One in my demo had something crawling underneath the earth, although I could be deterred by just rocks. Developer Seth Rosen told me that while the biomes (there are around four) are set in stone, a lot of the elements are procedurally generated, so if you die and have to redo a section, you’ll run into different obstacles every time. 

Despite roads, you’ll find yourself going off-road often, not only because of the aforementioned obstacles but also because a lot of objectives are in the middle of nowhere. This pushes you to explore these large areas, find new items, and begin expanding your repertoire. Of course, once the countdown expires, a giant plasmic storm will bathe everything in red, cause you to float, and then kill you instantly.

While you can die often in Pacific Drive, especially in the beginning, the developers didn’t want that to define the game. When you die, you don’t lose all of your loot, and over time, you’ll gain upgrades and knowledge to nearly avoid it altogether. The storm also won’t be as aggressive as it was in the demo, so players won’t have to worry about only having 15 minutes to escape an all-encompassing wave of death. 

Pacific Drive, yes, is a survival game of the highest order. It’s full of stuff to do and collect, extraterrestrial (maybe eldritch?) horrors to avoid, and places to drive. This genre isn’t for everybody, especially because it tends to have a high difficulty curve. There were a few moments in the preview where I couldn’t figure out what to do at first, although Rosen talked about accessibility options that can affect difficulty in the final release. However, Pacific Drive seems to have all the right stuff to appeal even to people not familiar with survival games. With an intriguing world that dares you to explore, even if you get sucked up into a storm and die horribly.