Pacific Drive (video game)

Content sourced from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

Pacific Drive is a 2024 survival game from Ironwood Studios, published by Kepler Interactive. It’s a first‑person game set in a fictional version of Washington’s Olympic Peninsula in 1998. You drive a station wagon through the Olympic Exclusion Zone, trying to find a way to escape while avoiding strange anomalies.

Gameplay basics
- Your car is the core of the game. You repair and customize it in your garage and use it to move between road junctions.
- The map is a network of junctions. Each junction holds resources, junk for scavenging, and “anchors” (anomalies) that you collect to power a gateway back to the garage.
- If you stay too long in a junction, or fail to manage the gateway, the area destabilizes and damages you and your car.
- You can upgrade and repair your car with parts you find or craft, and some fixes need special one‑time items.
- The Fabrication Station in the garage helps you harvest resources, craft blueprints, and create items that unlock new routes, add fuel, or affect zones.
- Your car can develop quirks (funny or annoying quirks like a horn blaring when turning) that you fix with a special MS‑DOS computer called a Tinker Station.
- Anomalies can be dangerous or just tricky, sometimes affecting controls or lighting. Some zones are irradiated and hurt you and slowly corrode the car.
- Zones can also change conditions, like stronger explosions or darker areas, adding extra challenges.

Story and setting
- The game’s world is the Olympic Exclusion Zone, a mysterious place created by scientists and government agencies after experiments with “LIM technology” caused disappearances and strange phenomena.
- The player is known as “the Driver.” After a detour and a teleportation accident, you find a working station wagon and a garage run by Oppy Turner and her colleagues, who guide you to use the garage and try to break the Remnant within the car.
- The car is a Remnant—a psychic link bound to the station wagon. The group searches for a way to separate you from it and escape, uncovering a big mystery called the Deep Zone and a key event known as the Mass Hallucination.
- In the end, you explore the Deep Zone, learn more about the people who studied the phenomena, and return to the garage with the Remnant gone.

Development and release
- The game was created after founder Cassandra Dracott started Ironwood Studios in 2019. The idea came from driving through the Pacific Northwest.
- Development began around 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic.
- Pacific Drive uses Unreal Engine 4.
- It was announced on September 13, 2022, and released for PlayStation 5 and Windows on February 22, 2024. An Xbox Series X/S version arrived on October 23, 2025.
- A DLC called Whispers in the Woods released on October 23, 2025, alongside the Xbox release.

Reception and impact
- Pacific Drive received generally favorable reviews. Critics liked the atmosphere, the car design, and worldbuilding, but some found the gameplay repetitive or hard.
- The game sold over 1 million copies by February 2025.
- It earned several award nominations and won Best Music at the Indie Game Awards in 2024. It was also considered for BAFTA and other awards.
- A television series adaptation is in development with Atomic Monster, executive produced by James Wan, among others.

Extra details
- The game features a strong focus on the player’s relationship with the car and on unscripted, creative problem solving rather than heavy inventory grinding.
- Feedback often highlighted the game’s striking setting and vehicle customization, with some praise for its audio and music contributing to the eerie mood.