Pacific Drive is a fantastical driving/survival/crafting game, where you are sucked into a reality-altering unstable zone, with the only working car the trapped residents have seen in ages. This is a very story-rich exploration game.
In 1947, the Olympic Peninsula in Washington state became a staging ground for developments in a new technology. Unfortunately, it didn’t go as planned, and by 1955, the government had walled off parts of the peninsula. 30 years later, after expanding the radius of the walls many times, the government finally sealed all access and abandoned it. No one ever found out what happened inside the wall. All was quiet until you happen to be driving by in 1998…
Finding the road blocked by the wall, you turn off on a dirt road parallel to the wall, hoping for a path through the region. The ground in front of you starts shifting and morphing until you drive near it and it pops back into stability… until a large enough burst of energy kills your car’s engine completely.
You sit in dark silence for a moment, until a massive burst of red glowing energy suddenly swells next to you, dragging your car off the road and into the vortex!
You wake up on the ground, surprised to see bits and pieces of your car floating through the air. The slightest tingle of radiation courses through the air around you. You realize that you’re inside the walled-off peninsula now.
Wandering down the path, you find an old station wagon in a garage, flashing its lights at you. Over its radio, you hear someone chime in. They’ve detected strange but familiar energy readings coming from your vicinity. They identify themselves as Tobias Barlow and Francis Cooke.
The vehicle is extremely beat up, rusted, missing several panels, two doors, and the front left wheel. You find a wheel sitting nearby and install it yourself. You try the engine and surprisingly, it starts up!
You can’t respond to Tobias and Francis, but they’re tracking the energy your car is giving off. They instruct you to drive a few miles up the road to a safe zone, before the incoming instability scrambles you. You pull up to an auto shop, right as your left front wheel falls off again.
This shop belongs to Dr. Ophelia Turner, or Oppy, as the two guys call her. But without working vehicles, the shop has been mostly abandoned for years. When you turn on the power in the shop, she’s alerted to a trespasser and threatens you over an intercom. But Tobias quickly sends out an emergency broadcast, insisting that you’re there on official business for them. Oppy is annoyed, but intrigued that you have a working car. She lets you patch it up in her garage and assists you in your journey, if only to help you find a way back out through the border walls and out of her hair.
This will become your staging area for the rest of the game; you’ll always return here after each mission. This is also the only place you can save your game. You can’t save during a mission; you either need to complete your mission and return home, or abandon it.
At this point, the game becomes a crafting game, except almost exclusively for your vehicle. You learn how to repair, build and replace parts, and even upgrade and add components. You can also upgrade various stations in the garage, and even upgrade your gear to better protect yourself in the wild.
Oppy instructs you to use this strange “repair putty” on the damaged parts of your car. It’s a pale green glowing goop that seems to magically restore parts to their full strength! It’s in limited supply, but you can always make more at the workbench. This is how you repair your car as it gets beat up in the field.
She also has you fill your trunk with cardboard boxes and a craft mat. The boxes will be your excess storage, outside of your backpack. The craft mat will let you build tools and resources on the road. Your tools have a limited durability and will break after so much use. But as long as you have resources on hand, you can easily craft another one from the trunk of your car.
Finally, Oppy has you install an Arc Device in your passenger seat, her own personal invention. This will be your map, as well as a guide to warn you as anomalous storms approach. It auto-rotates to face you no matter where you’re standing, so you can glance over at it while driving, or you can run up to the passenger window and view it quick.
Also included is a status screen on your dashboard, which will inform you of the “health” of your car’s parts. As you take damage, each component will turn from green to yellow to red, then gray as they break off the vehicle. Be sure to repair your car as needed!
There is a giant map on the wall of the garage, and Oppy is able to remotely access a projector to display data on it. This is where you’ll pick your missions. She instructs you to go find parts to build an antenna for the garage; otherwise, you’ll never be able to travel far. The zone within the walls is unstable and entire regions could be erased entirely, or reconstructed into another land that didn’t exist previously, so you need to be able to receive data about each region before - and during - your travels there.
It’s explained to you by Tobias that your car is a Remnant, which is essentially a shabby cast-off item imbued with strange properties, that randomly appears within the zone. He gives the example of a broken microwave that freezes food instead of heating it, or a rusty paint can that produces every color of paint in existence. Your car gives off this same energy, which is exciting for him because it’s been several decades since the last remnant appeared, and it remains to be seen what strange properties your car will produce.
Most of the game is spent exploring regions and scavenging all the parts you can find. You’re told that most all of the zone is abandoned and each region could cease to exist if a wave of instability passes through, so you might as well loot everything that’s not bolted down. Be aware of aggressive machines roaming the lands. These floating guys in particular will just grab your car and drag it into the woods before abandoning it.
While out scavenging for parts, I ran into these creepy mannequin-like guys stuck in the ground. They pulse red from the head or chest, and if you bump into them, they explode. The creepiest part is, if you get close enough to them, then look away, when you look back at them, they’ll be much closer to you. You never see or hear them move, and they never attack you or anything, but if you’re not paying attention near them, you might turn and walk into one suddenly. You need to stare them down while backing far away, so they don’t pursue you behind your back.
Once you’ve completed your objective in each zone, you need to find and grab a stable anchor, a round glowing ball sitting on a large semi-circle device, and feed it to your Arc Device. It will cause some instability in the vicinity when you pull it, so be careful.
Grab as many of them as you can! Your map will point them out in the region. There are always a few of them scattered around, and you use their energy to unlock more advanced technologies and blueprints back at the garage. So the more you find, the quicker you can upgrade your crafting capabilities.
Once you have at least one, you will be able to use the Arc Device to open a gateway directly back to the garage. But only activate it when you’re ready to leave, as it will quickly collapse the stability in the region. Make sure you know where the gateway is and that you’re relatively close to it, Then once you summon it, drive like mad into the giant sky beam! Be prepared to do a bit of off-roading for this part.
As you explore, you can find paints, decals, and other trinkets to deck out your car. Plus, keep upgrading its components to make it stronger and more efficient. Here’s my car after applying some glow-in-the-dark decals, adding off-road tires, and replacing all of the panels and doors with steel.
This has been an extremely entertaining game so far! I’m enjoying the open world exploration, scavenging parts off other vehicles or wherever I can find them, and of course, I love driving games! That’s your main mode of travel in this game, so you’ll be doing a lot of it. Your car is your lifeline, so stick near it at all times!
This game is pretty in-depth, and with 11 hours of gameplay already, I’ve barely scratched the surface of the plot. I’ve been so preoccupied exploring around and looting everything that I can get my hands on, that I haven’t actually made it very far into the story yet. I’m debating taking a brief hiatus from posting these so I can really enjoy this game.
_sideffect@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Holy crap, nice write up! I didn’t read all that, but amazing effort.
The game sounds like subnautica but on land with a car… Is that a fair comparison in your opinion?
QuantumStorm@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Yeah its definitely close to that vibe. Throw in a healthy dose of the anomalies from the STALKER games and it’s damn close. It’s a great game.
cobysev@lemmy.world 1 week ago
I’ll be honest, I haven’t been able to get into Subnautica. I spent like 2 hours swimming in circles, trying to figure out what to do in that game before I realized I was supposed to check messages or something on the escape pod first. I felt totally abandoned and alone in the ocean, without much of a direction to go. It was a little too “open world” for me, if that makes sense.
Pacific Drive, on the other hand, drops you right into the action, with three people in your ear helping guide you through this strange and unique world. You can always go off and explore regions on your own, but your primary objectives are always clear. I don’t think I could get lost if I tried.
I’ve been meaning to go back and try Subnautica again. Maybe I’ll do a write-up on it and see if I enjoy it, now that I’m used to crafting/exploring games.
lime@feddit.nu 1 week ago
interesting perspective, because while i completed subnautica i got tired of pacific drive. mainly because subnautica is open and static. you can make your way around a problem area meaning you get by with less time scavenging, while pacific drive is relentless and random, and will absolutely fuck you up if you don’t have the right ingredients. it sells itself on its driving aesthetic, but you spend so little time actually in the car that it seems pointless. it’s all just digging through trash and crafting.