There are a lot of ways you could describePacific Drive, I think.
Pacific Drive is a series of bad things waiting to happen to you.
Pacific Drive preview
Let’s make this clear: it’s a science fiction game at heart.
Bad things waiting to happen.
So this morning I was deep in the Zone, deeper than I’d ever been before.
The wind was raging.
The rain was falling.
The sky was filled with ominous black specks, like a murmuration frozen in a single fleeting instant.
For some reason I was tooling through woodland in my station wagon, negotiating trees in very limited visibility.
At this point I realised a couple of things.
Firstly, whatever I’d seen would probably kill me, so I should probably leave it be.
So I rushed back to the car, and wrenched bring up the door.
I’d wrenched open one of the back doors, and on the passenger side too.
No time to close it.
I raced around the back of the car and got to the driver’s door.
I had a back door open and flapping in the breeze.
Also various alarms were going off.
Also, I’d just turned on the windscreen wipers instead of grabbing the wheel.
In case you’re able to’t tell, all of this was thrilling.
And deadly: that run, as it were, did not go well after that.
But it highlights a couple of things that are great about Pacific Drive.
You’re safe until you suddenly aren’t.
Your car is a source of additional safety, but it’s also irritatingly fragile.
It took me quite a while to get to this point with Pacific Drive.
It’s not that the game starts slowly.
It’s more that it took a while for me to properly get to grips with it.
At first I was all elbows.
They choose the focal point.
They handle the light.
They even advance the film - if you’re using film - when you take a picture.
You have to prime the shot and then take it.
And after that you oughta remember to advance the film so you don’t get a double exposure.
Okay, that analogy got away from me, but look at the opening sections of Pacific Drive.
You find a junker by the road and coax it into driving.
Compared to the car you were just in, it’s a shambling horror, a true Rocinante.
You follow crackling radio instructions that lead you to an abandoned garage filled with bizarre cobbled-together tech.
And then you plot another journey out into the Zone and do it all over again.
There’s scanning stuff, crafting stuff, crafting smaller stuff so you can craft bigger stuff.
But out on the road it’s just as awkward.
For the first few missions, your trips into the Zone are for simple things at least.
But getting back home is its own wild trip, regardless of how straightforward the mission was.
Rocks take to the air.
The storm gets worse.
The road gets worse.
The steering wheel bucks in your hand, the tarmac won’t lead where you want it to.
Who knows how long that portal will remain open?
It’s almost unbelievably stressful.
It’s Pacific Drive.
