If a game were to be judged solely by the humor that its premise, mechanics, structure and presentation can generate, Pacific Drive would not only rank among the year’s best, but would rank right up there with other indie gems as a testament to the immeasurable capacity creatively from relatively small studios. Exploring the so-called Olympic Exclusion Zone in your trusty station wagon is a subtle experience where you can’t rely on anything and where the tactile nature of controlling every variable truly surprises you.
But unfortunately atmosphere isn’t everything, or if it is, it’s achieved and maintained in other ways, and this is where Pacific Drive’s lack of technical polish and overly irregular survival mechanics start to create rough edges.
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Let’s start at the beginning. Pacific Drive takes place in our world, but with one key difference: A few years ago, some sort of anomaly began to appear somewhere in the Pacific Northwest region of North America (roughly Oregon, Washington state, and parts of British Columbia). It is a geographical, biological and completely incomprehensible event that causes phenomena in a radius of more than 100 kilometers and, in pure Annihilation style (seriously, you have to see this film), animals, plants and the ground on which we live going, coming into being and the air we breathe are strange, unpredictable and changing. The man decides to investigate the area, but in the end the results are too uneven, too strange, and instead it is decided to encapsulate the phenomenon with a dome several hundred meters high, leaving some behind the walls.
Here you are sucked in for no reason and the few survivors in the area decide to help you escape. To do this, you will have to take hold of an old station wagon, an authentic American family car from the 70s, and transform it into a tool that will help you map the region’s phenomena and ultimately escape from there.
I’m spending more time than usual introducing the scenario, but perhaps it serves to show you how well the whole thing works and how efficiently and fluidly the game manages to set it up. In more practical terms, the game is a slight mix of different elements we’ve seen before. The game takes place in first person, and from a base that also happens to be your workshop, you embark on expeditions into relatively large open areas within… well, the Zone. Here you collect resources, avoid enemy phenomena and return to the workshop to make necessary repairs, upgrade the car and finally expand the workshop with new tools that will allow you to go deeper into the area where only worse dangers lurk.
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So yeah, a little bit of roguelite, a little bit of survival, a little bit of crafting… it’s all there and you get the pleasure of keeping track of your resources, saving up for important upgrades, while sometimes getting thrown under the bus. Bus the game’s various malevolent phenomena and you must return to the workshop with the destroyed car, which lacks the necessary resources for even the most basic repairs.
However, the game manages to structure your experience with obvious objectives, so while you can freely explore selected parts of the area and collect resources at a time, there are specific sub-goals to achieve, such as reaching a specific part of the area or with interact with an object. Everything is very well organized and although the game lacks a more organized narrative structure and therefore more emotional moments, like Firewatch it manages to make the most of the lack of characters. However, depriving the player of their own voice is a real mistake.
But the best part is how “tactile” everything is. Everything on Pacific Drive requires intervention. Putting the car in D or P, turning on the windshield wipers when it’s raining or turning on the lights when it’s dark, removing a broken tire and putting a new one on… all of this requires presence and presence and contributes to a loop marked through rudimentary but satisfying tasks. .
What is the problem? A solid atmosphere, a good premise, nice survival structures? As with so many projects, it’s the little details that matter. Firstly, the game on PS5 is in poor technical condition, to say the least, where the frame rate is normally 30 fps, but is also characterized by drops to 20 fps, which is frankly unacceptable. Plus, it’s great to be so tactile when making repairs, but the whole convention, the set of rules behind which buttons do what, is so confusing that it took me days to get the hang of the entire setup. And in the end everything is a little unbalanced. It requires too many resources to make general improvements, the nights are too long and deprive you of a reasonably basic overview and therefore overview of what’s happening, and certain phenomena feel more like unfair attacks on the player than solid challenges that need to be overcome can be done or avoided.
In other words, Pacific Drive was probably still a QA test or two away from being ready for prime time, which is a shame when the developer is supposedly pushing to release the game in perhaps the busiest month of the year, especially the PS5. I’m not sure why, but it seems particularly inappropriate when the game’s main problems relate to fine-tuning, balance and technical refinement, all of which could be achieved with just a few more months of development.
However, it also means that even if I give it a 7 today, Pacific Drive could one day be something special, one of those wonderful indie wonders that really put the studio on the map. Don’t lose sight of it because this idea is simply brilliant.