I do like games with finality to them, what with a credit screen or some sort of last big hurrah. A line in the sand that someone else put that says “it’s ok, move on”. I’ve noticed of late that I’ve been drawn more to games with a seemingly infinite tail, but an unstructured one. I played Return to Moria much longer than I needed to, Enshrouded certainly fits that bill. Valheim I’ll get back to when the next continent launches. Survival games in general have this longer tail, as there’s a need for an optimized cycle that seems to scratch my itch. Probably why rogue-lites work well with me, it’s about incremental progress and juggling multiple variables.

Pacific Drive is a survival rogue-lite that is really quite a bit different than anything out there. Perhaps that’s unfair, Pacific Drive is a mix of multiple known ingredients in a different meal, and a damn fine meal too!

It’s a story driven survival game, with pieces of horror. High level, you get sucked into a contaminated area that is always trying to find new ways to kill you. You get to drive a station wagon around this zone, collecting materials, and then returning to base to upgrade both the base and the station wagon. There’s a pile of story in here, both as to why the zone exists and who brought it to be.

The rogue-lite portion is more about you dying on these voyages, and losing whatever you accumulated on that run. The larger challenge here is that each run is friggin’ long. The first few runs are fine, you have a single zone with some things to avoid and a bunch of stuff to collect. The risk factor is rather low, and the pace of collection follows. You then get multiple hops along the path, needing to select “safer” routes. There are actual stable zones, meaning there’s nothing trying to kill you – so optimal to collect stuff. Normal zones escalate in difficulty, and you have generally around 15 minutes before it goes all out to kill you. And then there are deadly zones, which are to be avoided at nearly all costs.

The challenges of any roguelite relate to the risk/reward formula. Progress is gated behind materials (some of which are only found in later zones) and energy (which has 3 tiers, and again per zone). I hit a point where progress was gated behind a set of mid-point resources and I got absolutely wrecked through zone obstacles. I lost an hour of progress, shut the game, and left it alone for a few days.

When I returned, I went into the options and disabled item loss on death, which dramatically changed the approach to a run. Material collection was the sole priority, and as long as I collected enough materials to “rebuild” the car, everything else was a bonus. Rebuild in this case was the bare minimum, as survival wasn’t even a thought anymore. Risk dropped to next to nothing and it felt more like a farming game. This was not better.

The only answer I can provide to this model is a mod that allows you to instantly teleport to a previous discovered zone. You’re only in the “easy” zones to get to the hard ones, and this would save the 5 minute drive per, and avoid what feels like extremely bad RNG damage. It’s a weird spot. It can also be that I simply value time in a different metric than the target audience.

I like Pacific Drive, or at least I think I do. The concepts are cool, the storyline is quite interesting (all NPCs are through the radio), and you have meaningful progress to track. The art is really well done, the ambiance is constant, and you always feel the need to push just a little further. My personal challenge here is that there are tons of other games in my backlog that fit my time constraints.