When I first heard about Ironwood Studio’s survival horror game I did not really know what to think. The setup was intriguing for sure: you are trapped in a quarantined area of the pacific northwest with some crazy dimension-bending things afoot. You must make your way out whatever it takes. How the game sets itself apart is that the survival part is all about a station wagon. Yup, a beat up piece of Americana is your lifeline, the only way you will survive the harsh and often weird exclusion zone.
The game starts you off driving a delivery van close to a massive wall, and you discover that some disaster happened and that barrier is all that separates us from doom. As your delivery truck gets near a checkpoint, strange things start happening. Rocks and debris start floating around you defying gravity. Electricity pulses and your van goes dead. After a beat, the entire vehicle is upended and sucked into a portal landing you in the very place the game has just spent the last few minutes explaining you must never go. You are alone on mountainous backroads, strange anomalies all around. Your radio crackles and you hear a voice on the other side. Urging you to run, to get away from the portal and the craziness abound. It is an intriguing start to be sure and I was already invested.
It was at this time we meet your companion for this journey, your beloved station wagon. The voice over the radio can’t believe you found a working car, that its the only one in the exclusion zone and it can help you make your daring exit. You drive the car to a nearby garage that will serve as your base between excursions. Here you can customize and upgrade your car and get more background on the story of this place and the shady conspiracy-ridden company at its center.
Here, that gameplay loop starts to take shape. You prepare your vehicle, make repairs, load it with supplies, then venture out into surrounding zones to complete story objectives and gather supplies for repairs and upgrades. The narrative is paced slowly allowing you to get the feel for how things work. On your excursions, you drive your car into an abandoned neighborhood (most likely filled with creepy manikins) you exit your car to scrounge each building for that last bit of metal to upgrade your bumper to take more damage. After grabbing everything that isn’t nailed down, you dash back to your car, for there are dangers all around from the afomentioned gravitational forces to strange spookily advanced robots that want nothing more than to fling your car off the side of the road. Your car filled to the brim, you need to make an exit back to your garage but that involves finding strange rocks throughout the map that can power your vehicles special onboard computer that can help you find portals to make your escape. You have to navigate to one of these portals while a paranormal storm rages around you. Random pillars erupt from the ground, sudden gusts blow your car off course, a bolt of lighting fries your cars electronics disabling the lights and wipers making it hard to see. It all blends together to make the minute to minute action tense.
The controls do take some getting used to. The game never leaves the first person perspective, which is great for atmosphere but not so great for making steering a breeze (although that is probably the point). If you have ever played a Far Cry game or Cyberpunk in first person you know what kind of driving I mean. I did feel attached to my car as my journey continued. You don’t see any people out in the exclusion zone. Your only communication is over the radio. Truly your only real companion is your station wagon and the isolation adds another layer to the overall experience.
Without giving too much of the story away, I will say that while the minute to minute gameplay did draw me in, it does start to drag as the story continues. It is the same routine of upgrade, go to harder zones to find better parts to upgrade so you can go to harder zones. In addition, the story does have a bit of an anticlimactic ending. After finally making it out, you end up right back where you started. I get that the developers wanted you to keep playing, finish upgrading your extensive tree of improvements and keep playing but it does kind of feel like what are you really working towards if not to escape. I did enjoy my time with Pacific Drive. Its a fresh take on survival horror and offers more than enough for its price tag.
