Ironwood Studio’s first game is a dense roguelite caRPG filled with mood, intricacy, and captivating mythos.
Written by Mark Delaney on February 20, 2024 at 7:00AM PST
Personally, I detest driving, but video games manage to make it more pleasurable. Seldom does a video game make driving as engrossing and rewarding as Pacific Drive does, even though it can be significantly more taxing than any real-life drive I’ve ever had. With abundant gameplay depth, a mesmerizing ambiance, and an unconventional tale I fixated on, the debut game from Ironwood Studios impressed me even though it sometimes left me marooned in the breakdown lane.
I haven’t encountered a game much like Pacific Drive in both narrative and gameplay context before. Trapped in a secretive part of the Pacific Northwest known as the Olympic Exclusion Zone (OEZ) that’s been shut off for years due to inexplicable phenomena, your goal is to escape from a region notorious for absorbing nearly anyone who ventures into it. You’ll accomplish this in roguelite attempts where you navigate a station wagon through a semi-randomly generated level or a series of levels, acquire crafting commodities and essential assets, and then outrun a storm to reach a spacetime-altering “gateway” that catapults you back to the relative safety of a deserted auto repair store, where you’ll store your resources and utilize them to upgrade your vehicle and your character for succeeding attempts.
For more than 20 hours, this formula never wore out its welcome with me, despite some truly grueling situations that sometimes felt insurmountable. By way of great attention to detail and depth, Pacific Drive becomes a challenge early on and consistently raises the bar even as you markedly improve your car. It feels like it unfolds–as do many roguelites–to the cadence of two steps forward, one step back.
You won’t just have to worry about obvious car problems like flat tires, though they’ll occur often in the early-game while your tires are no better than would-be spares. You’ll need to ensure the car’s body, like side panels and doors, are in good condition so that they may protect you from the often-irradiated OEZ. You’ll need to be wary of the times when you get out of your car, as various hazards, like towers giving off jolts of electricity and hunks of metal that fly around like UFOs, are openly hostile to you. And as the game goes on, the list of these “anomalies,” or enemy entities/events, only gets longer.
One fantastic element of these anomalies is their foreign designs and behaviors are so hard to decipher that it causes me to almost want to test them so I could better understand their nature and later know how to overcome them more wisely. But there’s a simpler way: You can scan basically anything in the game to learn about it, from scraps of resources to anomalies, and even different kinds of stranded cars and trucks you’ll see in each level.
But even then, scanning them only reveals an anomaly’s behavior through weird excerpts of conversations you weren’t present for, demanding you deduce the important traits of an anomaly from something out of context rather than simply scanning it like a video game’s detective vision and immediately understanding it.
It’s not just the unpredictable nature of each anomaly, but the sheer quantity in the later stages that makes each journey a perilous expedition. Being forced to change course to evade an anomaly may leave you unprepared for the rough trails ahead, which likely house other dangers.
In the same vein, the game’s real-time clock indicates that if you find yourself traversing a patch of road in the dead of night without functional headlights, survival and progress is going to be a precarious, steep endeavor. Covering the distance from point A to B is the fundamental concept of Pacific Drive, but in reality, it seems more like manoeuvring from A to W to R to D to M, finally reaching the fleeting sanctuary of B, and then embarking on that sequence all over again till the game finishes.
Mastering the art of surviving the countless and diverse hindrances involves embarking on journeys sans your main aim. Occasionally, you might have to delay the upcoming major plot point to scour for metal scraps, rubber, or any of the other multitude of resources. Similar to anomalies, scanning these items aids in comprehending them better, like identifying locations to find more, thus accumulating enough over time to bring significant upgrades to your ride.
Yet, the pacing of the game is so astutely designed that, just when you feel invincible at the helm of your gradually upgraded vehicle, it ups the ante to match your confidence. Just when I started to enjoy the luxury of reliable tires and functional headlights, the game would hurl new anomalies that posed different kinds of challenges, such as those affecting my battery life or the speed at which the world crumbled.
Researching over 100 different blueprints and upgrades provides immense depth and satisfaction. Improvements range from practical to cosmetic, transforming a basic vehicle into a marvel akin to Ghostbusters’ Ecto-1. The blend of gameplay advancements and visual flair brings an RPG-like feel to the experience.
Pacific Drive conveys a true RPG feel—or a caRPG, to be precise. Early improvements are generally beneficial, such as off-road tires. However, later unlocks let you strategize against levels’ unique challenges by adopting specific builds. For instance, a faster car that consumes more gas, or radiation protection when anticipating an intensified storm.
The outstanding music pulls you into the game’s atmosphere, with custom tracks from Pacific Northwestern bands. The ability to change radio stations enhances the experience. The music genres are diverse, from ethereal vocals to indie folk rock to synthwave, contributing to the game’s tantalizingly vague timeline.
Though set a few decades back, the game features audio logs in the style of a Serial-style investigative podcast. This, coupled with catchy music and eerie radio broadcasts from lost souls, infuse the game with a hauntingly creepy air, despite it not being a true horror game. Engrossing from start to end, the game focuses on surviving the Zone’s oddities, whether scavenging from buildings or ensuring the survival of you and your car.
It’s a world that feels composed of many of my favorite narrative touchpoints from other media. I liken the OEZ most obviously to Night Vale; there exists a DHARMA Initiative-like scientific body at the heart of it all; and I couldn’t help but recall The X-Files or the last act of 10 Cloverfield Lane whenever I crept through the woods dodging alien-like enemies. Pacific Drive feels as if it’s made by people who love these things like I do, but it never feels like a copy of any of them. Its world is its own, ultimately, and one I’ll not forget just like those others. I’ve chased down audio logs and other optional story insights in this game with an enthusiasm I’ve previously reserved for Remedy’s games.
With so many upgrades to choose from, so many resources to scavenge, and so many semi-randomized threats to be wary of, the game’s greatest flaw is, oddly enough, sometimes a strength, too. On many occasions, I’d feel lost, both in terms of which upgrade was most important to emphasize next, but also how to upgrade certain things. I also had my main story progress halted for a few days while I tried to resolve, eventually with the developer’s aid, why I couldn’t seem to find a route to my critical-path destination. In the end, a lack of clarity on the map was to blame.
Pacific Drive revels in being hard to grasp, but sometimes it feels like it’s unintentionally obtuse, or maybe just didn’t know when enough was enough. Its opaqueness is an obvious strength when I’d enter into a level and not understand what I was witnessing before my very eyes, but it was less endearing when I sometimes felt like I didn’t have any answers to my questions in a simple gameplay progression sense.
I once deposited a great deal of my crafting supplies into a machine that I then learned destroyed them, as it’s meant to break down bigger pieces into those usable parts. The game didn’t warn me or adequately explain beforehand that my already small pieces would be “broken down” into dust. Pacific Drive lets you mess up like this pretty frequently, though while you’re at the shop, you can combat this by saving often so you can load a backup if needed. I didn’t make this particular mistake twice, but even once felt like a harsh penalty. Such halts didn’t stop Pacific Drive from being one of my favorite games of the year so far, but with just a little bit more guidance, I think I’d have felt a lot more enjoyment.
To its credit, the game is loaded with difficulty-tuning options that often target its own punishing difficulty and can make it more digestible. You can do things like make nights go by faster, remove damage to your car or character, or even have it so that a failed run doesn’t remove the would-be lost supplies when you get back to the auto shop to try again, among other benefits. I appreciate these options as they’re going to mean more people can finish this game without the constant threat of their car, and intriguing story progression, breaking down.
With its wonderful depth in both story and gameplay, Pacific Drive is an early hit in 2024. It 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. Though the game can be especially hard to decipher, difficulty options help to counter some of its more overwhelming aspects. I’ll stick to bikes in my day-to-day life through the actual northwest, but in Pacific Drive, I’m up for another joy ride through one hell of a winding road.
