Car mechanics, rejoice: new video game Pacific Drive requires you to maintain your vehicle to survive
Hand me that 13mm spanner, you fiend
Looking after your motor has never been so important: a new survivalist video game comes with an unusual twist — to make it through the end alive you need to maintain your car as the top priority.
Pacific Drive from Ironwood Studios, to be released on February 22 for PC and PS5 with a predicted price of £24.99, is experienced entirely from a first-person perspective, with the setting an apocalyptic (and supernatural) realm of the USA’s Pacific north-west called the Olympic Exclusion Zone. It is plagued by mysterious anomalies, strange technology, hostile enemies and angry weather; perhaps even more so than is standard for that part of the world.
As Pacific Drive’s teaser trailer further explains, this whole zone is surrounded by a 300-foot-high wall, meaning the only way of escape is to venture out into the hazardous wilderness and scavenge essential supplies.
Family Truckster in metallic pea, anyone?
Key to survival in the story is keeping your trusty — and not a little rusty — old “station wagon” (that’s “estate”, in UK-speak) going.
In a nine-minute-long gameplay video led by the title’s developers, the creepy environment of the zone is explained and detailed more clearly.
Ironwood’s creative director, Alexander Dracott and game director Seth Rosen talk viewers through the loop of the title’s core gaming mechanism.
The gamers’ base is a garage near the edge of the exclusion zone. In there, they can craft replacement parts for their car, make essential repairs, or even plot upgrades and personalised modifications.
Players can also plan routes through the area, with various junctions featuring abandoned old wrecks and derelict building structures that can be scavenged for parts. It’s also possible to explore outside the car on foot, though gamers must make it back to the vehicle to get out of every level — so forgetting where you parked becomes a life or death situation.
Exploring deeper into the ruined and perilous Olympic Exclusion Zone is only possible by using the station wagon, so players will have to make sure the car is in tip-top order.
Love your car — quirks and all
It’s an intriguing proposition, because it would appear that Ironwood is writing a love letter to the automobile, rather than just producing another zombie-horde-type survival game.
The clear message is that players will have to love their car, something reinforced by the impressive “quirk” system, in which the vehicle will randomly generate weird behaviours with which pretty much every classic-car owner will be familiar.
For example, players might find their car switches on its wipers when they turn on the headlights, or it opens the bonnet when you close the rear door. A feature in your home garage allows players to try and diagnose these quirks and then fix them — but only if they want to, or the idiosyncrasy in question is endangering missions out into the zone.
Pacific Drive looks like a fantastic blend of a ravaged, dangerous landscape and some proper petrolhead garage tinkering, so we can’t wait to try the title out when it officially launches on February 22.
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