Pacific Drive is a first-person driving survival game set in a surreal interpretation of the Pacific Northwest in the 1990s. Players navigate the challenging landscape of the Olympic Exclusion Zone, encountering supernatural dangers and unraveling mysteries as they strive to survive. The game emphasizes resource gathering, vehicle customization, and exploration within a hostile environment.
Players control a car as their primary means of navigation and survival. They must contend with shifting landscapes and supernatural hazards while venturing into the Zone. The game features a garage acting as a home base where players can restore and upgrade their vehicle using gathered resources. Each excursion into the wilderness presents unique challenges, requiring players to adapt their vehicle and strategy accordingly. The game has some roguelike elements, but the punishment for failing a mission is not a game over and a loss of resources, but usually a heavily damaged vehicle back at the garage requiring a lot of patching up. Players can choose to follow the main missions or venture out freely to gather resources or hunt down lore. The car starts as a ramshackle mess and can be upgraded over time, but the conditions consistently influence the handling so the player constantly wrestles for control.
The game world shifts with each journey into the Zone, presenting players with unpredictable challenges involving anomalies in the environment, different weather conditions and quirks that effect the car and its handling. Players scavenge resources to craft new equipment and modify their car to suit their preferences. Experimentation with different mods and car parts is encouraged. Almost every part of the car can be damaged, customized and replaced, from the hood to doors and wheels. The latter can go flat and fuel often needs to be siphoned from other cars or barrels to keep driving. Repairing the vehicle on-the-fly using various tools with a portable crafting area in the trunk and scavenging for materials are essential aspects of gameplay. At any moment it is possible to step outside the car and explore on foot.
The narrative centers around unraveling the mysteries of the Olympic Exclusion Zone, an abandoned research site filled with anomalies and remnants of the ARDA organization. Next to gathering lore through scanning elements in the game world, there is also a one-way radio communication provided by different characters present in the environment.
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