Vehicle Horror Survival In Pacific Drive

This is my car. There are many like 🍬it, but this one🐭 is mine. It’s important that you form a personal attachment with your means of transportation in Pacific Drive - it is, after all, connected to you via an other-worldly power known as the Remnant. It’s also your only protection against the harsh Olympic Exclusion Zone, the apocalyptic setting of this upcoming roguelike vehicle horror survival game from Ironwood Studios.

It isn’t billed as a roguelike. Even during my 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Gamescom 2023 preview the term wasn’t thrown around, nowhere near as much as “adventure” and “survival”, yet the game has strong roguelike elements. You take your car out on runs to gather resources and complete quests. The maps are different each time, but some parts are reused - such as the garages, abandoned science labs, and wrecked vehicle🎃s. I was worried about the repetition of these assets to begin with, but they do provide a sort of grounding f🍒amiliarity. You know what to look for, and how to approach each scenario. It’s also likely that the landscape will progress as the game does.

During each run, you can collect resources, cosmetic items, and other rare trinkets or materials that will be useful later on. The landscape is a violent place, littered with buildings to loot, objectives to complete, and anomalies (electrical charges, glowing green geysers that spout from the earth, and hovering matter that will send your car🦄 flying into the forest if you get too close) to avoid. At the end of the run, you need to grab Anchor charges to allow you to return to your garage (more on that in a moment), and once you activate the exit gateway, the world begins to shr🦩ink, not unlike the closing ring in a battle royale. You’ll want to make it to the gateway, a column of glowing green light, before the ring closes. Trust me. Your car is a fragile friend.

Back at the garage, which operates as a safehouse with upgradeable modules, you can repair your vehicle with magical putty and install new workstations - like a material recycler, or a cosꦕmetic and detailing station to add a little more pizzazz to your wheels. Things don’t get as technically and mechanically deep as they do in games like My Summer Car or The Long Driv💦e, but there’s a general satisfaction as you bolt on new doors, or upgrade your set of headlights. Maintaining your vehicle has been simplified, but not by much.

While you&rsquo𝓡;re driving around, collecting loot, and upgrading your car, there is a pervasive sense of unease. Whether it’s the disparate voices that come through your car’s radio, or the gurgling flying drones which moan on the wind, Pacific Drive is unsettlingly scarꩲy. I haven’t had a jumpscare, seen a monster of any description, nor really had any sort of properly unsultry run-in with an anomaly: the dark trees and ruined buildings are enough for me. Crash test dummies are scattered around too, frozen in place like the victims of Pompeii. Turning a corner and seeing one with its hands pulled up over its face did make me recoil once or twice.

Your car is like a warm beacon. It possesses a radio, which plays mostly licensed music, and it grows dimmer the further you walk away▨ from it. I’d often find myself driving just a little closer to a building or Anchor so that I could listen to music as I went about my work, rather than listen to the piercing silence, gurgling anomalies, or trees cracking in the distance. It’s a testament to the game’s world building that I formed a rapid symbiotic relationship with my car: that’s really the point of the entire game, as far as I can tell.

My main concerns with Pacific Drive is it becoming repetitive. During the first couple of hours, its quests and narrative were solid enough to drive me forward, as well as the discovery of new materials, upgrades for my car, and cosmetic items. What worries me is the game losing its pa👍ce - looting another abandoned gas station with an identical backpack on the counter and copy and pasted toolboxes in the back room might get tedious. I hope the full experience continues to change and innovate upon the promising foundations I glimpsed in this preview.