Many video games refine, redirect, or perfect existing genres. A rare handful invent new ones. Quite a few blend genres to freshen either one or both. And then there are games which take, two, or three, or more genres and throw them into an unholy stew that creates something original and unrepeatable — not the start of a new genre, but a total one-off.
I love games like this, and my favorite of the last few years is Pacific Drive: an apocalyptic sci-fi-horror survival roguelike road trip simulator, currently available on both Xbox Game Pass and PlayStation Plus.
In Pacific Drive, it’s some time in an alternate 1990s and you’re exploring the Zone, a bizarre, irradiated wasteland in the Pacific Northwest that’s been abandoned since a science experiment went wrong in the 1950s. Your transport for this adventure is a creaky old station wagon which you progressively customize into a valiant, specialized, exclusion-zone-exploration vehicle.
In the game’s slender plot, your character has some kind of psychic bond to this car. Honestly, developer Ironwood Studios needn’t have written this in. You’re guaranteed to develop a symbiotic relationship with, and deep fondness for, the rickety old banger as you play.
Pacific Drive is all about pushing deeper and deeper into the semi-randomized Zone map as you seek to uncover its mysteries on missions and self-directed runs. The aim is usually to get to an endpoint, or just as far as possible, and gather material for upgrades as you go. Playing in first person, you gingerly drive your car through the Zone’s wild hazards, and get out to scavenge battered research stations or make impromptu repairs to keep the wagon going.
It’s a really tough, capricious game. If you don’t pay attention to small details — like not running your car battery down by leaving your headlights on — you can end up in serious trouble. There aren’t traditional enemies, as such, but there are wild, possessed bundles of scrap that will attach themselves to your car and damage it, wayward drones that will try to drag you into trees, walking pillars of lightning, and pools of toxic waste everywhere.
If you die, or abandon your run because you can’t go on, you lose all your loot and your car takes extra damage that will need to be repaired. I’ve limped back to my garage with most of the car’s panels and doors missing, then needed to craft new ones. In order to complete a run, you need to trigger a gateway — a terrifying pillar of light that ruptures and radically destabilizes the landscape — and race toward it as reality seems to crumble around you.
This race is the heart-pounding climax to any run, but playing Pacific Drive is seldom peaceful, even though it can be slow and methodical. It’s spooky and tense, and luck plays as big a part as preparedness or daring in your success. There’s no way to save in a run, so the stakes keep mounting as you play, and it’s quite easy to lose an hour of progress or more.
This is a survival game in the sense that it belongs to a genre of games about starting from scratch, gathering and crafting to improve your chances in a hostile world. It’s also a survival game in the purest sense — that navigating hazards and staying alive at any cost is what counts.
But what really makes Pacific Drive so compelling is its unique personality, most of it embedded in and expressed through the car. This is still a driving game, and the physics of the station wagon, with its springy suspension, loose steering, and low-torque, rumbling motor, are satisfying and full of character. There’s moody indie rock on the stereo, and Zone inhabitants chatting and bickering on the radio so you don’t feel so alone. The landscape is forbidding but awe-inspiring, filled with monolithic, abandoned structures straight out of Half-Life 2, lit by eerie phenomena, and soaked in the misty, forested atmosphere of the region, with its lingering memories of Twin Peaks and The X-Files.
Pacific Drive’s particular genius is to invest all your upgrades crafting work, not in a stationary base, but in a car you climb into and take with you, that serves as your inventory, your lab, and your suit of armor as well as your transport. That makes it a unique survival game but also, in its twisted way, a great celebration of the joy of the road trip. It’s a game about working hard to pack up everything you care about, your life, your hopes and dreams, and taking it on the road. What could be better?