Driving through the Olympic Peninsula is something of a Pacific Northwest rite of passage. It's a landscape so unique and majestic it must be experienced firsthand: the primeval forests carved through by winding, tenuous roads, the violent coast and snow-capped mountains, and, of course, the disembodied voices calling out as you drive through shifting clouds of interdimensional mist.
The new car-based survival game Pacific Drive offers an evocative, atmospheric portrayal of a warped Pacific Northwest where you play as the caretaker of a spooky, beat-up station wagon trying to escape a walled-off Olympic Peninsula, which has become tragically haunted by science after a mysterious experiment goes wrong. Think Lost meets Little Miss Sunshine. Each expedition sends you and your jalopy out to explore another route through an enigmatic Olympic Exclusion Zone, unlocking traits and equipment you can then use to power up future runs and, eventually, to find your way home. Even if clunky mechanics prevent Pacific Drive from being the smoothest of rides, there's intrigue to be found while unlocking the mysteries of the Zone.
In practice, this means a lot of scavenging supplies, crafting gadgets and maintaining your car. The better the whip, the better chance to dodge wandering chaos rifts as you navigate depressingly realistic weather conditions and reckon with a kind of wandering alien squid that's always looking to knock your beloved wagon off into a tree. It is a fresh take on the survival genre, one that offers an even weirder and more unexpected version of the Olympic Peninsula than the real one (which is really saying something).
The environment is absolutely the star: Warped by a kind of generic science accident, the fabric of reality itself is constantly shifting in the Zone. Distortion fields twist the landscape, roads blip in and out of reality as you drive over them, and strange creatures roam unseen beyond the trees. Walled off for decades and filled with the accident's mysterious energy, the Zone has given rise to an unnatural ecosystem inhabited only by a few stranded researchers, their bygone experiments, various unnatural entities and, now, you.
Despite all this weirdness — in part, because of it — the game's version of the Olympic Peninsula feels uncannily authentic, the real and unreal complementing each other to depict a world both recognizable and deeply strange.
And what a gorgeous world it is. Pacific Drive excels at evoking the impressive physicality of the Pacific Northwest, from the majestic firs to the sheets of hanging moss to the misting rain that blows in and lasts for days. The best parts of Pacific Drive involve winding through the forest on a dirt road that's turning to mud beneath your tires and you can barely see the robots for the raindrops streaking across your windshield, your wagon almost out of gas but with just enough to make it home... as long as you don't go look down that one last side road. But... you've just got to pull off and look. That's the beauty and the horror of Pacific Drive — you've always got to look.
Unfortunately, one reason you've always got to look is that the fiddly crafting aspects of the game often require it of you. The driving controls, for their part, are taut and accessible, and the in-cockpit controls are both intuitive and surprisingly immersive, but remaining gameplay is your standard survival fare: scavenging, crafting, durability-watching, and walking just a little slower than you'd like.
This would all be more tolerable if harnessed to a plot and characters able to bear the moment-to-moment narrative, but the atmospheric complexity of Pacific Drive is largely skin-deep. While the scientists you meet are entertaining, funny and useful as generators of chummy exposition, they're also very familiar. We've met these stereotypes before — the jaded idealist, the curious junior partner, the disgruntled artisan with a heart of gold — and these versions will do the job and nothing more. They carry, but do not lift. The plot is much the same: While the first hints are enthralling, it ultimately lacks the substance of the best science-fiction worlds, compensating for its lack of depth with atmospheric weirdness.
That's ultimately the conundrum of Pacific Drive: It delivers a wildly interesting PNW world to explore... only to make you do some very boring things in it. ♦
Pacific Drive
