A survival roguelite driving game in the apocalypse? An extraction looter mixed with My Summer Car? Coming Feb 22nd to PS5 and PC.
A couple of previews hit today:
One of Ironwood’s best decisions is to fully ground the player in the physical reality of this world by allowing full first-person camera control even when driving, and insisting the player consult an elaborate, in-universe map/information system called the ARC Relay installed in the passenger seat rather than bring up a menu screen or rely on a HUD. It helps immersion so much to glance over your shoulder at an anomaly while driving, or tilt the view so you can keep one eye on the road and the other on your hulking, flickering proto-GPS.
There are a lot of ways you could describe Pacific Drive, I think. It’s sort of an extraction looter, in which you tumble into horrible worlds and try to emerge with something worth stealing. It’s sort of a blend of Roadside Picnic, the novel about scavengers who explore a strange area of wilderness that’s been thoroughly messed up by passing aliens, and My Summer Car, the Steam outsider art classic about building and maintaining a real junker and then tooling it through the woods. These are all fine ways of approaching the game, but for me it’s much simpler - and much more thrilling. Pacific Drive is a series of bad things waiting to happen to you.
I’ve seen a bit of the beginning and it looks really great. I’m adding it to my wishlist!
A bunch of the streamers I follow on YouTube were given copies of this so a ton of playthroughs are hitting today. Splattercat also came out with a video today:
yeah, I’ll be looking out for that, too. Sad that it isn’t on Xbox, but at least I’ll get to try it out on the Deck (if I ever get mine repaired grumblegrumble).
I like how working on the car gives a point to looting and crafting, in a way that say Starfield’s optional outposts or Avatar’s optional seeds don’t necessarily manage to.
I just completed the Demo and liked it. I didn’t like it as much as I thought I would, mostly because I felt like I was fighting the UI a lot of the time (they overload the keys so a tap on a key does one thing and a long hold on the same key does something related but perhaps more ‘complex’ or involved). I also found the blacks were super black when I went indoors at night - they have a setting for ‘brighter nights’ or some such but that didn’t change building interiors for me.
FYI, Greenman Gaming has a sale on it now, $21.59 vs the list price of $29.99 (which will be $26.99 on launch week if they apply the traditional 10% launch discount). I’m close to pulling the trigger but not quite there yet.
I played the demo as well and was underwhelmed. As you state @Charlatan the interiors are so dark, very hard to see.
But the complaint that is every scavenger’s complaint for me is inventory management. Not even 1/2 into the first area, my inventory is full.
Another thing that really bugs me is the quests. I had to look up how to progress in the garage because a trunk wasn’t highlighting b/c you had to to into the ingredients, find the car door and pin the recipe. Only after each of those steps would the next quest marker show up. What a convoluted UI mess.
Finally, the car was attacked by an abductor, and as I had just scanned it, was trying to read a novel of multiple pages that comes up after scanning it, when I just got super annoyed with the attacking and quit.
That’s when I learned there is no save. You have to go into these areas, loot and escape to get to a save point. I don’t know what the criteria is for escaping, or if you can come back to a spot multiple times, but not having any save is really frustrating.
Oh, so you’re playing this SP game and your buds message you and want you to jump into a game they are playing? Guess you’ll have to abandon this one and restart the mission from the beginning.
“Runs that take well over an hour” that you can’t save = no buy for me. Just doesn’t fit my lifestyle where I rarely have known uninterrupted blocks of gaming time.
No mentions that the really wonky control scheme (long and short button presses) were worked on either.
And that doesn’t even factor in the UI, a haze of tap-for-one-thing, hold-for-another obfuscation, which must have at least partially been designed to be deliberately awkward - a little prank, an opportunity for more gallows humour.
