‘Pacific Drive’ offers gorgeous surreality and a satisfying challenge

Pacific Drive’s emergent storytelling is as compelling as its constant fight for survival.

May 20, 2024

It was the napkin dispenser that got me.

Stranded in the Olympic Exclusion Zone, my soul bound to a station wagon that will not quit even after annihilation, I was hunting for two things. The first was a way out—of the Zone and my looming doom. The second was supplies. Rubber, steel, glass, duct tape. Anything I could, with some ingenuity and the reluctant help of a brilliant, antisocial scientist nicknamed “Oppy,” shape into new parts for the car. Some supplies were as simple as off-road tires. Others were impossible technology that harnessed the powers that created the Zone.

The car would be my end, devouring my mind until it was all I could think of. But there was time. Time to hunt, time to search, time to drive, time to fight. The car, dangerous as it was, was also my best friend. My chariot through the Zone.

I was exploring a comparatively stable sector. The worst problems were living buzzsaw blades and vicious rain, as opposed to a reality-breaking radiation storm. I came across an abandoned house and made my way inside with a crowbar. No one had lived there for who knows how long. A mattress was set atop some crates to serve as a bed. The kitchenware, though mismatched, had clearly seen a good deal of use, and a small table was set for one—a plate and utensils and a restaurant napkin dispenser, mostly full.

I had no idea how that napkin dispenser ended up in a tiny house in the middle of a forest in the Pacific Northwest. It was far from the strangest thing I had seen in my wandering, but it was a mystery all the same. A fragment of a life that had been, a ghost of a memory I happened to cross paths with. Who’d brought it with them? Why? These were not the hardest questions to answer in the Zone by a long shot, but they were not questions I could answer at all. Once I left the sector, the Zone’s inherent capital-I Instability scrambled everything. The house, the table, and the napkin dispenser ceased to exist. And with the Zone being the Zone, it was entirely possible they didn’t exist until I found them despite their apparent age.

It’s stuck with me, that napkin dispenser. Just as much as a pack of electrified mannequins or the ruins of a would-have-been military-industrial complex.

Pacific Drive, Ironwood Studio’s adventure/survival/loop mystery, is a game built to make moments that stick with you. At its best, it balances puzzle-solving, evasive action, and exploration to create a tense and striking mood. At its most frustrating, it can be merciless to the point that it sucks the fun out of itself—though a generous suite of gameplay customization options counterbalances that.

Structurally, the game runs on loops, a la Hades: after preparing yourself and your station wagon as best you can, you venture out into the Zone in search of answers and supplies. In practice, those break down into narrative set-pieces and scavenging. Navigating a run requires that attention be paid not only to where you’re driving but what shape you and your car are in and the state of the current sector. Even the Zone’s calmest sectors are dangerous. Those dangers range from bizarre floating creatures made from scrap metal that will happily send you flying to more familiar perils like steep, rocky inclines or plain old bad weather.

The dangers in Pacific Drive aren’t constantly cranked-to-eleven run-like-hell peril; they’re a roller coaster. There are surely nail-bitingly tense peaks, like summoning an exit portal and blitzing there as fast as your car will take you as the sector begins to collapse into an Instability storm. Even knowing exactly where I need to go, how to get there, and that I’ve built a car to do just that, I wouldn’t exhale during those chases until I pulled back into the garage. Conversely, there are moments of stillness and quiet, like the napkin dispenser, where the world Ironwood has built creates space for you to tell your own stories. To paraphrase Keanu Reeves in A Scanner Darkly, Pacific Drive’s runs are built on ugly things and surprising things and sometimes little wonderous things.

A successful loop means returning to the garage with the resources necessary to upgrade the station wagon and the garage itself so you can plunge deeper into the Zone. An unsuccessful loop means (on the game’s default settings) limping back minus anything you found on that run, at least some of the gear you brought with you, and possibly parts of your car as well. In my case, I washed up back at the garage with a stripped tire and two of my doors just… gone. While the garage’s Friendly Dumpster can offer you stopgap parts, a run going sour means either dipping into your pooled resources or taking another run to resupply.

In and of itself, it’s a harsh but mostly fair system, with my personal frustration being that, in its default settings, the penalty for abandoning a run and outright failing is the same. Early in my time with Pacific Drive, I got flipped onto my driver’s side door with no way to open it or to exit the car otherwise—leading to a forfeit. There’s hard, and then there’s punishing, and when Pacific Drive drifts from the former into the latter, it goes from nail-biting to hair-tearing.

Fortunately, Ironwood offers extensive options regarding its rules, including reducing or outright eliminating the penalties for an unsuccessful run and making it possible to shift the game into a more sedate mode. Personally, I opted for a middle ground—one where failure is still possible, and danger and resource management are still constant factors. If I need to bail on the run, I don’t need to burn through my supply stash to get the car back in working order. It’s thoughtful, elegant design work, and I’m glad it’s an option.

Aesthetically, Pacific Drive is gorgeous to hear, see, and, on the PlayStation 5, feel. The DualSense’s haptics react to terrain crossed and the process of driving. Flooring it on a well-preserved stretch of highway doesn’t feel like dancing through deep woods and dodging trees. Visually, the Olympic Exclusion Zone captures a sweet spot between the familiar and the alien—at the extremes and in the margins.

Take its hub level, the garage, for instance. It’s a mixture of Oppy’s custom-built bleeding-edge technology and a long-abandoned place that you, the player, are gradually returning to life. Closing the garage door shuts out the rain and lets the overhead lights work a bit better. It’s too purpose-based to be as homey as Cyberpunk 2077’s apartments or Eternights’ train, but there is a welcome familiarity; it’s a constant in a perpetually changing world. As far as sound, be it Wilbert Roget II’s score, a selection of moody licensed music, or the ambiance of the Zone, Pacific Drive’s audio consistently cultivates an enigmatic, lonely mood—the sound of searching.

All told? Play around with Pacific Drive’s gameplay options, find a groove you like, and get driving. This is a compelling, dense game with a world to get caught up in. Or, to bring it back around to that napkin dispenser, Pacific Drive is a game whose emergent storytelling is as compelling as its central fight for survival and investigation into the Zone’s mysteries.