Pacific Drive review: Not your average road trip

I drive in battered and bruised, my “living” station wagon having barely kept it together long enough for us to make our escape from a collapsing pocket of rural Pacific Northwest reality. As we pull into the garage, I patch myself and the car up. I fill it up, put away the resources I pulled, and see what I can craft. A side-mounted fuel container? Sure, that’ll help me explore longer and we may need that extra fuel for our next escape. I load up, clean up the garage, plot a course, start the car, and get going. And I can’t wait to see what kind of trouble we get into next.

That’s the delight of Pacific Drive. You take that car and you venture out into a randomized stretch of land as far as you can go, taking everything you can carry, and solving mysteries that could mean escape. Ultimately, this sci-fi road trip is a survival game at heart, and it may be one of the most interesting survival games I’ve ever played.

Welcome to the Zone

Pacific Drive takes place in an alternate history in the Olympic Peninsula. Around the 1960s, secret experiments that seemed to have gone wrong forced the government to curtain off the entire region, leaving all that was there trapped inside and attempting to keep everything else out of what became known as the Olympic Exclusion Zone. You play a nameless explorer that’s searching and scraping around the outskirts of the Zone when a mysterious force suddenly opens the barrier wall and yanks you inside.

Once inside the Zone, you stumble across a decrepit station wagon and use it to escape a sudden maelstrom of radioactive activity. Fortunately, you find your way to a garage and get in contact with a handful of survivors in the Zone that are willing to help you try to escape. Time is ticking, too, because it turns out that the station wagon you found is a Remnant: an anomalous entity of the Zone that sometimes bonds with living creatures. Its influence also drives bonded individuals slowly insane. That means you should probably get out before your brain melts.

Pacific Drive has a heck of a setting, some great visuals, and a compelling cast of characters who are in your ear for most of the game. Tobias, Francis, and Ophelia (or “Oppy”) are a trio that once worked for the organization running the Zone. Now they’re trapped inside and communicate solely by radio. Tobias is a head-in-the-clouds cryptid enthusiast that still finds the Zone rather interesting, Francis is a scientist that is concerned for the driver’s well-being, and Oppy is a cranky former lead scientist of the Zone whose garage you stumbled into. All of them increasingly rely on you to carry out missions that unravel mysteries of the Zone while trying to keep you alive long enough to get out, but they’re never all that demanding or annoying. There are even optional conversations you can listen to with them to get more of their backstory, which is a fun way to learn more about the Zone and its history.

The Zone is a character in and of itself. Every area you uncover is a fluctuating stretch of trees, roads, and mountains, as well as abandoned buildings and cars. For a game that’s so randomized, it still ends up being mostly cohesive and beautiful in its explorable environments. Meanwhile, keeping that station wagon fueled, charged, and well-equipped is your lifeline to surviving these treacherous areas. All of it is aided by both an original soundtrack and a licensed set of songs on the radio that all serve to boost the mystery of the game, as well as its dangerous road trip vibes.

Ain’t pretty to look at, but it’ll do the job

It isn’t long before you learn that all of physical reality inside the Zone is in flux. Pockets of space open and collapse regularly, mountains become swamps, and only by driving to regions and linking them back to your garage through portals can you explore further and dive deeper into the mystery. Unfortunately, the instability of the Zone means no place you explore will be exactly the same if you come back. Topography, buildings, and the threats you face will likely change each time you travel through an established area.

That’s where the station wagon ends up being an incredibly involved and evolving machine to manage. Nearly every piece of the vehicle is replaceable, damageable, and repairable, from its wheels and doors to the engine, battery, headlights, and equipment you eventually mount on it. As you enter areas, you’ll want to loot as much as you can and stow it into the wagon’s trunk, as well as pick up anchors of reality-altering energy that allow you to open portals back to the garage and access upgrades.

All of this resource gathering is mostly towards building equipment and parts to keep the wagon maintained and upgrading it to make longer trips without failing. I very much enjoyed when I’d get back to the garage and was able to begin piecing my car back together and seeing what I could make better. The game features a massive tech tree of upgrades to spruce up the car, your own protection and personal gadgets, and the garage for better preparation. You can even get a paint and detailing center where you can plaster the car with your favorite paint, decals, and accessories.

The Zone gets even more dangerous as you explore, too. In each area are non-sentient anomalies that take the form of different threats. For instance, Abductors are cobbled drones of floating machinery that buzz around in the air. If you get too close to them, they’ll throw a tether on your vehicle and try to drag the wagon into trouble. There are also the Rabbits, which are like little energized tumbleweeds of scrap containing different types of radioactive, corrosive, or electric energy and will try to attach to your car to mess up its systems. The anomalies only get more bizarre from there with all of them having some sort of unique behavior that can do you or your vehicle harm or send you sideways into a bad predicament.

It all culminates with you getting anchor energy and activating a portal on the map, which you have to drive to or risk being caught in a deadly radioactive storm as the section collapses. Every trip out is a menagerie of discovery, scavenging, and then a dangerous sprint to escape to the portal. If you die, you and the car get sent back to the garage without any of the resources you collected. It’s an intense trip every time and the outcome can be devastating if you lost some particularly good stuff.

I will mention, there’s very little way to fight back against anomalies outside of escaping them. You don’t have any real weapons in this game. The closest things to offense are flares and a flare gun, which both give you light and can serve as a distraction to anomalies that take notice of them. I also had some issues with hills. Trying to go up steep slopes in Pacific Drive sometimes has your car slide backwards in weird ways that make little sense, even if you’ve got good tires on. Finally, I wish there was an auto-arrange function. You spend a lot of time in inventory menus and it’s kind of tedious to have to put all your resources away manually all the time or in ways that don’t make the best use of space.

Loot and scoot

Pacific Drive is a mystery that draws you in little by little and rewards you for staying dedicated with both a better vehicle and more ridiculous threats. Every excursion left me wondering just what I’d discover, both from survival and story standpoints, as well as what kind of crazy threats were going to try to make my life harder. Fun and interesting characters and a pretty great soundtrack help to keep things fun, but maintaining the station wagon is easily the most compelling part. It’s your best friend through thick and thin, even if it’s trying to eat your mind. That can be somewhat forgiven since it makes up the core of an ultimately great rogue-lite survival game.

This review is based on an early PC copy supplied by the publisher. Pacific Drive comes out on PlayStation 5 and PC on February 22, 2024.

TJ Denzer

Senior News Editor

TJ Denzer is a player and writer with a passion for games that has dominated a lifetime. He found his way to the Shacknews roster in late 2019 and has worked his way to Senior News Editor since. Between news coverage, he also aides notably in livestream projects like the indie game-focused Indie-licious, the Shacknews Stimulus Games, and the Shacknews Dump. You can reach him at tj.denzer@shacknews.com and also find him on Twitter @JohnnyChugs.