Pacific Drive: Drive, Survive, Repeat
That's no ordinary family station wagon anymore... Pacific Drive is a run-based, first-person driving survival game coming soon™ from Ironwood Studios. Your car is your only companion as you navigate a surreal and anomaly-filled reimagining of the Pacific Northwest.
That's no ordinary family station wagon anymore... Pacific Drive is a run-based, first-person driving survival game coming soon™ from Ironwood Studios. Your car is your only companion as you navigate a surreal and anomaly-filled reimagining of the Pacific Northwest.
Structured as a “road-lite”, each excursion into the wilderness brings unique and strange challenges, as you restore and upgrade your car from an abandoned garage that acts as your home base. With the car as your lifeline, you’ll unravel a long-forgotten mystery as you make your way to the heart of the Olympic Exclusion Zone.
Each run into the Exclusion Zone is another opportunity to scavage for new materials and parts. If you manage to get them back to your garage safely, the game's crafting mechanic kicks in, letting you reinforce and enhance your ride. Do enough runs and your trusty station wagon will start to look like it escaped from the set of a Mad Max movie.
The basic gameplay loop of Pacific Drive revolves around players taking excursions across the map for supplies and then returning to their garage hub to craft and make repairs and modifications to their vehicle.
Each visit to the Olympic Exclusion Zone is heavily randomised, where players will encounter dangers like harsh weather and strange entities known as anomalies. The symbiotic relationship between the player and their car is a core facet of Pacific Drive, with each protecting the other as they work to escape the Exclusion Zone.
Game Features:
- Drive hard and keep your tools handy: repair your car, swap out parts, and gather useful materials.
- Outrun the storm while facing strange perils in a world that shifts with every journey into the Zone.
- Scavenge resources to craft new equipment for your car and build new stations in your garage.
- Your car, your way - configure your wagon how you want, experimenting with different equipment to navigate a treacherous landscape, and look good doing it.
- Unravel the mystery of the Olympic Exclusion Zone, an abandoned research site in an anomaly-filled version of the Pacific Northwest.
- Original score by Wilbert Roget, II and featuring 15+ licensed songs.
The randomisation of the game extends to the variety and locations of buildings and resources, the weather, the map layout, the biome, the spawn points of the anomalies and hazards, and other random game events.
Ironwood Studios Founder and Creative Director, Alexander Dracott, and Lead Game Designer, Seth Rosen, want players to play the game at the level and in an approach that they are most comfortable with.
The thing that I want to return to is that we really want people to play this game in a way that makes sense for them. Like, if that is turning off damage entirely and just experiencing the story, great, do that.
It is a first person driving game, if you are not comfortable driving from a first person perspective, it is probably going to be difficult for you to get through this experience on some level. But if you're able to deal with that, and find a way to make that comfortable for you, again, we'll have like lots of camera settings in the options menu and everything like that, you can turn off damage and just have a narrative experience with it, you can just kind of play it as a survival crafting game.
And, you know, obviously, there is content that opens up by progressing through the story, but we're not forcing you to do it, you can just do a run-based game forever. And for players that want to kind of straddle both of those, that's also available there. Because of all the randomness and procedural elements, continuing to go on runs should be exciting and engaging every single time whether or not you're still pursuing that kind of initial mystery. And what we've seen in play tests is that with all the sort of surprising combinations of things, you know, your story with you and your car can continue past credits rolling.
Seth Rosen, talking to Screen Rant
Ironwood Studios is a young Seattle based game development team made up of experienced developers with a long history in the industry. Pacific Drive is the studios' debut title, but members of the team are not strangers to game development. Amongst the many projects they've been a part of in the past are Age of Empires, Halo Infinite, Call of Duty: WWII, Mafia III, Bioshock Infinte, Don't Starve, and Planetside 2.
Pacific Drive is scheduled to be released "some time in 2023" on PC (via Steam and Epic Games Store) and on PlayStation 5. It is currently available to be Wishlisted on all three stores.
