Pacific Drive first caught my attention in 2022 during September’s PlayStation State of Play presentation thanks to its intriguing concept. The debut title of Ironwood Studios, Pacific Drive is a run-based, first-person survival game in which you explore an anomaly-filled reimagining of the Pacific Northwest (called the Olympic Exclusion Zone) from behind the wheel of a car you discovered in a rundown garage. I attended a preview event for the game where I got to see a scripted build of Pacific Drive and toss out questions to Ironwood Studios founder and creative director Alex Dracott and lead gameplay designer Seth Rosen. Based on my time spent with the game, Pacific Drive looks like an enjoyably tense game to play.
In Pacific Drive, you find yourself trapped on the wrong side of the Olympic Exclusion Zone, a place beholden to a strange supernatural weather phenomenon and filled with government secrets, bizarre geography, and terrifying monsters. Stumbling upon an abandoned garage, you make it your home base and plot your escape. Your only way of navigating the Zone is via the station wagon you find in the garage. As you venture out into the Zone, you’ll find that the environmental hazards and enemies shift and change with each run, meaning you’ll have to adapt on the fly even if you explore a part of the Zone you’ve already visited. As you explore, you can find resources to repair the damage done to your car as well as scrap that can be taken back to the garage to permanently upgrade your home base and unlock new add-ons for your vehicle.
The Zone possesses some form of intellect and will do its best to push you out upon noticing your presence. This makes revisiting areas of the Zone you’ve just traveled to incredibly dangerous, encouraging you to constantly branch out and slowly explore in a wide net of directions instead of pushing straight for your goal on a single road. And when you want to return to the garage, the signal you put out to mark your path back alerts the Zone. To stop you, the Zone will create a dangerous storm of glowing red energy that slowly encloses around you–much like the ring in a battle royale. You can’t die in the Zone, but if you or your car take enough damage, the car’s emergency protocol activates and teleports the two of you back to the garage, a process that burns through most of the resources you recovered on that particular run.