Luke and I have both been playing driving survival game Pacific Drive. Luke wrote last night about his dislike of the save system, a feeling I can relate to. But I think we’re not talking enough about how good I am at three-point turns in this game.
I’m really good at them! This is weird, because I am terrible at driving in games and have not driven a real-life car in over a decade. My skills are probably helped along by the fact that something is wonky with my car’s wheels and if I don’t navigate the roads carefully enough, I have a tendency to fishtail and end up facing the opposite direction of where I meant to go.
So I spend a lot of time carefully re-orienting myself, executing nifty three-point turns left and right without even smashing my car’s bumpers to bits on rocks and guardrails. I would say I spent about 35% of my time in Pacific Drive in this way, a true testament to my driving skills.
Here are some other things I’ve gotten good at after a few hours in the game:
Grabbing things and running. I’ve watched a bunch of YouTubers playing this game, and I don’t think any of them are quite as adept as me at finding something in a crate, hearing a scary noise, and making a bumbling beeline back to the car while smashing into every wall, railing, and rock on the way. There aren’t enemies in Pacific Drive exactly; instead, there’s lots of Annihilation-esque weirdness that provides a low level dread, occasionally punctuated by zaps, explosions, or floating robots that suck you into the air. For me, this is way scarier than standard “leap out and eat you” enemies; everything is probably nothing but could be something, and that leaves me in a constant state of panic.
Putting the car in park so I don’t lose it. I never forget to do this, because your car has a good chance of rolling away if you don’t. As both Luke and I have said, maybe the best part of this game is pressing all of the buttons. It’s never not fun to turn the key and pull the lever, ensuring my car will be right where I left it.
Losing my car even though it’s right where I left it. It’s almost always dark on my forays into the game’s Zone, and since your map is a physical object in your car rather than a HUD, once you’re on foot, you have to rely on your wits. I simply love to completely forget where I left my car, even with the help of the proximity meter. I recently did this in an area full of radiation, watching my health tick down while I wandered further and further in the wrong direction. Even though I know all about the STOP procedure for getting lost in woods, I like to totally forget it in Pacific Drive and just run around like an idiot until I find my car by accident.
Ignoring the map. Your map is a computer that sits in your passenger seat; to look at it, you have to physically turn your character’s head. I find it a little hard to read without actively entering its menu, but you can’t really do that while driving. I’m not great at reading maps in real life, so perhaps it’s no surprise I’m not great at them here: I like to alternate between setting a waypoint and then off-roading wildly on my under-equipped tires to get to it, and glancing at the map, saying “OK, I need to take the next left” and then somehow never coming upon a left. While a dedicated map HUD would surely make the game a little easier to navigate, the way the game uses its map not only increases the feeling that you’re really in a car, but forces you to engage with the shifting landscape of the Zone and really witness its creepy, ever-changing weirdness.
Losing the gateway even though it’s a big glowing thing. You leave an area by triggering a gateway, a giant glowing pillar you have to race to before the landscape collapses. It is VERY big, but it can be hard to spot when you first trigger it, obscured by trees or buildings or the view from your car. The smart thing to do is to trigger it, then step out of the car and see where it is, but I find that hard to do because I get panicky and just start driving, glancing at my map and three-point turning my brains out until I get sorted. You have to be a certain distance away from a gateway to trigger it, a design choice surely meant to ensure maximum panicked driving time, and the frantic race to it is always pulse-pounding.
Panicking in general, really. I am probably Pacific Drive’s best panicker. The idea that there’s a countdown, either from the gateway or from an area’s deadly storms, frays my nerves, the way it does even in more chill games like Spelunky or Outer Wilds. I like the tension this adds to a game that might otherwise feel like too much tedious looting, even if the stress has made it a little bit hard for me to get my bearings when combined with all the information being thrown at me through menus and abundant NPC chatter. Pace can be hard to master in survival games, and while I’m still not sure I love how Pacific Drive approaches it, the game has a distinct vibe that I can appreciate.
Not losing stuff in my inventory. Because you do a lot of looting, you end up with a lot of stuff. All this stuff is used in various crafting recipes, communicated in the game’s overwhelmingly cluttered menus. But there’s one feature that makes all this so much easier to handle. When you’re crafting at your garage, the game draws on all your inventories: what’s on your person, what’s in your car, and what’s in various containers. This avoids a problem I run into in lots of survival crafting games, where I have to go from container to container putting stuff into my personal inventory to use it to craft. In a game that seems to be about making everything as difficult as possible, I really admire this design choice on the developer’s part.
Obsessing about my car. You spend a lot of time in Pacific Drive tinkering with your car. There’s a narrative hook for this, set up by the idea that the car has sci-fi properties that will eventually drive you mad. I’m charmed by how this story idea dovetails with how clunky and granular your tinkering is. Every car part has its own condition you need to scan, assess, replace or craft kits to repair; I have lost hours just scrolling through menus and checking various monitors in my attempts to diagnose and address problems. The idea that this is symptomatic of my character’s mental state gives some color to what might otherwise just be too many menus. I haven’t gotten too deep into all the upgrade possibilities yet, but I’m excited about them. My first step is definitely going to be kitting my car out in brighter colors and with more lights, so I stop losing it in the dark all the time.
