168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Pacific Drive is an upcoming vehicle survival horror game set in the꧅ Olympic Exclusion Zone, located in the verdant Pacific Northwest. Your character, who remains faceless and voiceless throughout, is sent on an unknown delivery mission towards the zone.

A story unfurls as you explore different regions alongside your beaten-up jalopy, a car that you must care for, upgrade, and ultimately become attached to. The car is an extension of th🌠e character—during my many preview sessions, I became car. Your character has no needs, no voice, no purpose. The only pur🍸pose is car.

Alex Dracott, founder and creative director at Ironwood Studios, tells me one of the main inspirations for the game were trips in the family station wagon when he was younger. “When I got older I moved to Seattle - I’ve been here for about 10 years now - and one of my hobbies is driving out into the forest to take photographs of abandoned sites. In doing so, I r𒆙ealized that there is a big connection between car and place and tone and mood - that led to early prototypes of Pacific Drive.”

One of the main gameplay mechanics is caring for your car. It gets beaten up on runs, and every time you return to the home garage, you’ll need to do repairs to keep it in shape. By caring for the car, you protect yourself - the car becomes an extension of the survival mechanics. While you don’t need to eat or drink, if you don’t look after the car, you’ll face the consequences. “As the ideas became more fleshed out, of driving a car in the woods, we realized that putting the ꦐsurvival focus on the car allowed you to form a connection - the car is keeping you safe, so you’ve🐟 got to look after it.”

But keeping you safe from what exactly? The Olympic Exclusion Zone is riddled with surreal anomalies after a cataclysmic scientific event years prior, and while these provide 🅷a very real, very immediate threat, Pacific Drive also undulates with a subtle and pervasive environmental horror.

“I grew up in the area and driving through the woods atꦗ night doesn’t make me that uncomfortable, but that’s not everyone,” Dracott tells me. “At the start, with Pacific Drive, it was about nailing a specific mood that makes people feel uncomfortable. It makes them nervous, and a little afraid. As we progressed, we started to lean into it more.”

Having played around ten hours of the game so far, it’s the car that acts as a warm beacon in this unsettling environment. Music comes from the car&r༺squo;s radio, a stellar line-up of licensed tracks as wel🌼l as a full score from composer Wilbert Roget. Around 80 percent of the music in the game originates in the Pacific Northwest, Dracott tells me, which really helps build that sense of place.

Your car’s lights are often the only thing you can see in the thick fog. “For me, personally, there was always a level of eeriness around the game,” designer Richard Weschler tells me. “But there was a moment where it started to hit harder than I ex🐽pected it to. Part of the process is playtesting what is making people uncomfortable, and how you can lean into that further.”

Anomalies are a threat throughout your journey i🎃n Pacific Drive - eerie crash test dummies, known affectionately as “Tourists”, as well as seismic shifts in the landscape, spinning razor blades and electrical bursts are all out to get you. Weschler tells me that there’s a lot more to the anomalies th🦹an at first glance: “You might get comfortable with the anomalies, but you might see one do something new, and that adds to the discomfort - people think ‘I thought I understood this, but this isn’t what I expected’, and we lean into that, so we think people will be surprised, and creeped out, by what they find.”

As well as exploring, looting, and discovering new anomalies, the game is driven by a mysterious narrative - such as disparate voices that come from your mechanic’s headset. “I was pretty insistent that you, as a player, are totally yourself,” Dracott says. “It’s you, and a car that you find - the☂re’s no baggage or major history there. We wanted the relationship with the car to build up authentically.” As a character, you don’t respond or react to the narrative in any way, it’s you and your car, which you quickly find out has a much more important role to play in the story.

While Pacific Drive is positioned as a vehicle horror survival game, there are also roguelite elements and a cert꧃ain sandbox freedom to the world that encoura𒊎ges player experimentation.

“One of the most enjoyable parts of watching the game grow so far, and watching other people play, is that we almost always see some sort of new interaction or mechanic - things we hadn’t even planned for,” Weschler tells me. “For the full release, we&rsqu♐o;re just excited for players to jump in and tell their own stories. I’ll just say: poke things, prod things, and see what happens. You might be surprised by what they find.”

Paci♒f🅺ic Drives releases on February 22 on Steam and PS5.