Pacific Drive
Pacific Drive is not a horror game. The studio behind the game has been adamant about that since day one. Yes, it can be spooky; Ironwood Studio will agree. And yes, its threats are mysterious, harmful, and often cloaked in darkness, but this isn’t a horror game. I respect that authorial intent–I really do. At the same time, the game is quite creepy, so whatever we want to call it when it comes time to sort it into a genre, I think it’s pretty horror-ish. Horror is my favorite genre, but that’s not the only reason I love Pacific Drive.
Pacific Drive is a roguelite game that manages to feel unlike anything else. That’s extremely hard to do in an era positively flooded with roguelites. The beauty of its gameplay loop, set inside a vast stretch of procedurally generated roads and forests in the Pacific Northwest called the Olympic Exclusion Zone (OEZ), is how unpredictable it is. Its “enemies” aren’t exactly that, lending credence to Ironwood’s aforementioned claim. Instead, they are “anomalies”–weird things that happen in a big strange place where anyone inside of the OEZ is stuck there and everything there that isn’t a person is… uh… it’s hard to explain. Each anomaly has its own behaviors, and the trick is heading into a level behind the wheel of your station wagon, avoiding or outwitting these dynamic, unnatural events as best you can, while furthering the plot however you may be tasked with doing in that moment, all followed by you outracing a storm that collapses in on reality before it eats you up. With bits of roguelite and survival mechanics combined, and even something battle royale-esque as you outrun a storm to end each level, you can see how the game is a bit hard to explain.
Your best bet is to get behind the wheel and see it for yourself. The driving gameplay runs super deep, so you can create RPG-style builds for your car based on the specifics of the tumultuous road ahead. I never knew I’d appreciate a game that is, at a fundamental level, a driving sim of a sort, to this degree. As I said in our official Pacific Drive review, the game “sets out to create a world that fits comfortably in the New Weird genre but brings its own style and substance to it. The road from unreliable bucket of bolts to souped-up charger is a fascinating one whether you’re unraveling the game’s many mysteries or improving your wagon for its next road trip.”
— Mark Delaney