Pacific Drive (PlayStation 5) review "Roadrunner"

Starting in 1947, the U.S. government began experiments within the Olympic Peninsula. The contents of these experiments remained a mystery, but the results on the environment have been damning; several portions of land have gradually been closed over the span of decades, until most of the peninsula was sealed away from the general public. As Pacific Drive's story begins in 1998, you are an unnamed, silent character who happens to be driving on the outskirts in a decently-maintained car in a first-person perspective. Unfortunately, with the help of a sudden anomaly, their car was decimated within minutes.

Dazed and walking past floating pieces of the vehicle, you somehow find yourself inside the borders, the Olympic Exclusion Zone. After wandering for a bit, away from the radioactive green substance that is plastering the forest, you come across a raggedy station wagon after hearing voices coming from its radio. With a key still left inside the ignition, you try driving away... but a front wheel is missing. After popping in a nearby wheel, you finally drive off... but run out of fuel a few seconds later. After siphoning fuel from a nearby ruined car... you barely make it to an auto shop with your clearly-distraught vehicle. So with the introductory chapter over, you can finally do what the game's title heavily implies: crafting items near the Pacific Ocean!

While there is driving, and plenty of it, you're also given the job of crafting for survival's sake. Whether it's salvaging pieces from vehicles or houses, combined with creating useful items and maintaining your car, the opening hour or so is incessant in teaching you how to craft. Though, to its detriment, the tutorials are often cumbersome in their explanations, often leaving you to figure things out yourself. For example, the menu systems can overwhelm at first with their navigation and access to info, so it is best to get acquainted with them inside the safety of the Auto Shop hub. In the long run, knowing how to perform all these functions is beneficial and becomes second nature after a few road trips, but the tutorials' clumsy execution can be a buzz kill.

Thank goodness the game proper is genuinely engaging.

Pacific Drive can be best described as a dungeon crawler with roguelike elements. When leaving the Auto Shop, you must select a Junction destination to travel towards, whether it's due to plot progression or to scavenge parts. Each Junction, which is a portion of the Zone comprised of roads, forests, abandoned homes, anomalies, and whatnot, is the equivalent to a floor in a dungeon. Having said that, in order to reach your selected Junction, you must first travel through all other Junctions within its path. Whenever you enter a Junction, you will spawn on a road in the corner of a square-shaped map, with the ultimate goal being to exit this map after you've ransacked or completed a task. This sounds easy, because all you have to do is keep on the road and stay out of trouble.



It's never that easy.

It can be early afternoon in-game time, clear skies, and you'll be driving down the road in a fit wagon equipped with repair items. Then you see it: an anomaly obstructing your path. This encounter is a stationary electrical whirlwind that, upon contact, will cause damage to your vehicle. The obvious decision would be to drive around it, off road. To the left is a steep cliff that will send your car tumbling with one wrong move, so the only choice is the right side... which is filled with trees, both big and small. Even when carefully dodging nature's inhabitants, you accidentally knock over a small tree, damaging your bumper; this is displayed as a visual indicator inside your car, as the graphic turns from a healthy green to a yellow. Eventually, you escape the Junction with minor damage and decent loot.

Fast forward to the destined Junction, after making it through two prior Junctions... and your car is on the brink of death. It's past midnight, raining, several doors are in the yellow and cracked, the hood is in the red, a tire is balding, your battery is dying, and a flying anomaly stole a headlight. You only have one repair item left: a single use of Putty to fix one part. Use it wisely. You can craft an extra repair item or two in your workstation trunk, but at the cost of losing collected valuable pieces. If you "die" during a trip, you get transported back to the Shop without the majority of pieces salvaged. However, leaving said Junction intact will net you everything that's been accumulated. The latter is a gamble, but always worth taking.

You think leaving the last Junction would be one of the more easier objectives, but even that's a dangerous process.

When entering these Junctions for the first time, every exit is blocked off, including the one you've entered. If you want to leave and have these "floors" permanently open for future trips, you have to warp to the Auto Shop, and to do this, you must fetch a specific amount of Anchors and feed them to your wagon. Anchors, which are orb-like containers of energy, are typically in out-of-the-way spots, such as thick forests or steep hills; you actually need to travel on foot a decent distance to grab them. This is tricky for two reasons. The first is that the Anchors are radioactive, so you lose health running back to your car. The second is that an anomaly will attempt to obstruct your path back, such as Boo-like mannequins that explode if touched, or steam bursting from the ground... the latter which can launch your car in the air if parked too close.



Once you've gained enough Anchors, you can simply leave just hope you can escape without much incident. You have to be two or so miles away from a warp gate to activate one, and then immediately speed into the giant beam of light it materialized. The reason for this urgency is that a "yellow storm" will enclose the warp gate, until it completely engulfs the map. Being caught in the storm will do slow damage to your character and car, and on top of that, a "red storm" will follow shortly, which causes even more damage. Keep in mind, you also have to contend with the area's usual anomalies and conditions while speeding; so the chances of crashing or flipping your vehicle increases, not to mention worrying about status ailments that impact battery power and fuel.

Say you make it back: you now have to prepare your car for the next trip, losing some of your collected craft pieces for repairs and replacement parts. The remaining pieces can be put in the Shop's storage for subsequent repairs, but they also serve a crucial secondary function; combined with the Anchors obtained, you can create useful products for better performance and safety. Such examples include improved doors with more health, puncture-proof wheels, bigger trunk space, and even a device that can convert rainfall to battery energy. Some of the more valuable items usually need a ton of a specific craft piece, which are often located in dangerous areas of the Zone, so that's another important reason to salvage as much as possible.


A typical playthrough of Pacific Drive.

But even with hours of experience and the help of upgrades, you are always one second away from catastrophic failure; the unpredictable nature of anomaly encounters and conditions guarantees there will be a lot of goofy moments. Such wonderful disasters include backing up into an explosive anomaly, getting dragged through a forest by a robot that latched to your car, or dodging giant radioactive loogies being shot through the sky by a creature. They're both stressful and silly at the same time, and that's the point. If the default difficulty's anxiety-filled circumstances are too overwhelming for you, the devs have generously included an in-depth options menu that allows you to toggle off a ton of settings, making the experience closer to that of a relaxing road trip.

This cruise is definitely not for everyone, especially with the crafting elements being an instant turnoff for some, and the "tutorials" being obtuse in execution. However, if you're one to revel in fighting against the odds in an attempt to come out on top, this will provide that thrill on the default settings. Whether you view it as an adventure across the hostile landscape of the Olympic Peninsula or through the lens of a dungeon crawling template, Pacific Drive succeeds in providing a surreal journey that will take hours upon hours to complete.

Community review by dementedhut (June 30, 2024) Now if only I had the foresight to submit this OutRun review a day earlier...