April 21, 2024 - Day 477 - NewPlay Review
Total NewPlays: 500
Game: Pacific Drive
Platform: Steam
Released: Feb 24, 2024
Installed: April 18, 2024
Unplayed: 3d
Playtime: 2h24m
I wanted to make the last game in ProjectONG a game that was new to me, and a game I hoped would be good. Instead of playing something from my library, I wanted something new.
One of the things that caught me out many times over the past 500 games was an inability to describe their genre.
Many times it was a lack of experience with particular genres of games. It sometimes lead to me going back to a game because I had a new understanding of the game mechanics.
On several occasions, I found myself stumped because a game didn't cleanly fit into a particular genre.
To that end, Pacific Drive is a doozy. It's a first-person sci-fi supernatural-horror roguelite/extraction/survival crafting driving game.
It feels like someone took Firewatch, Far Cry 5, Car Mechanic Simulator, Destiny 2, Insurmountable, Fallout 4, Control, Voidtrain, Horizon New Dawn, and Prey, and made a Blendtec video.
It feels like influences come from all of these games (and more) in one way or another, and yet it's completely different to all of them.
Pacific Drive is set in what feels like an alternate universe version of what seems to be the Pacific Northwest of the USA. In this world, scientific experiments have rendered an area on the Olympic Peninsula as off-limits, an entirely walled-off region called the "Olympic Exclusion Zone". There is no way in, or out.
I won't spoil how you find yourself inside, but once you do, it becomes a survival game, where you must travel out into the constantly changing environments of the OEZ, to gather materials & blueprints to fix and upgrade your car, and tools, while learning about the mystery of what caused the events that lead to the existence of the OEZ.
To answer the question posited by Tom Dickson, "Will it blend?", the answer is "Yes". Pacific Drive is:
5: Excellent
