Idle Thoughts

Stalkcar – Shadow of Carnobyl (★★★★☆)

I have to say Pacific Drive gives a pretty bad first impression. It asks, “would you like to look at the settings before starting?” Ok, sure, why? And then it shows you almost 200 settings. You can turn off everything that makes the game what it is with extreme granularity, so that you can remove any challenge and play a walking (driving?) simulator with forced grinding, if that’s what you want. How nice. That’s modern game design for you, but still, I haven’t seen a game beg you to look at all its “accessibility” options like this before.

So I start the game. The gas pedal is tied to R2, but some ridiculous level of resistance was added with the trigger sensitivity. The R2 button is supposed to mimic the gas pedal, how is force required to press it? There’s got to be a way to turn that off right? Well, nope, or at least I can’t find it.

So much for 200 settings, huh?

But it doesn’t take long for the game to find its groove.

It’s like a streamlined version of My Summer Car or Mon Bazou, but instead you have a whole survival sim storyline in a Stalker-style exclusion zone. Except all the anomalies are oddly car-themed, which is pretty funny.

So the game is basically StalkCar, Shadow of Carnobyl (Get it? Car!). You roguelite your way into random hazardous areas, pop out of your car to get loot, and return home to craft and repair. Rinse and repeat. Despite its name, Pacific Drive is not a game about driving, it’s a game about having a car. Driving comes into it, but it’s the little details that matter. In most racing games, all you are is a vehicle and all you do is go vroom. Here, you need to manually put your car in park. You open and close the trunk door to root through your stuff. You put the fuel nozzle in the tank and wait for the gauge to go all the way up. Turning the key in the ignition gives a bit of resistance when starting it, but not when turning it off, which is exactly how it should be.

Blew a tire? Welp, better turn off the engine, step out of the car, open the trunk, get the spare tire, switch the tires, close the trunk and get back to driving. Except you forgot to put the car in park and now it’s rolling down a hill. Oops. Pacific Drive has just the right amount of fussing around with cars for my tastes.

A few things give the game its rhythm. For one, the anomalies are always out there, wrecking your car up, hence the blown tire. More importantly, the things you are looking for are “anchors”, which act as both your ticket back home and as currency for permanent upgrades. As the name implies, ripping out an anchor causes havoc, so it’s often a good idea to go get them on foot. Every anchor picked up is like a little heist. Once you have enough energy, you go back home, but not by doing something silly like driving back. Oh no. The only way home is by destroying reality and creating a bigass light portal to warp back. But you have to haul ass and drive into it while reality crumbles around you and eats away at your ride. Now we’re getting to the getaway part of the heist. Your car is now a getaway car. In that sense, the game is at its best when you come back to the garage smoking and sputtering, but alive and with a trunk full of fresh loot. What a great tension builder.

Any roguelite worth its salt now needs a good base-building side aspect. Here you get your own garage. It’s very cozy in that grease monkey sort of way. The garage can eat a lot of your overall play time. You store your loot, fill the tank, charge the battery, switch out some parts, replace that door that fell off, etc. You climb up a branch or two of the tech tree, which is surprisingly deep for a game of this calibre. You gradually transform your hunk of junk into a hunk of junk with a satellite dish, wind turbines, a back seat gas tank and other totally safe and sensible doodads. You pore over the road map to find the route that has the right amount of risk/reward. You can even paint your car and give it decals. What kind of car game would it be without some pimping?

Most of what happens in the garage isn’t strategy, it’s not even tactics. A lot of it is just busywork, mere maintenance. Literally car maintenance. But it is meaningful, because that’s what the game is about. You nurse your car back to health for its next adventure. You take care of your car and hope it will take care of you when the time comes.

Then again, the game is quite a few elements short of greatness. For one, you are never up against anything other than a random assortment of hazards. There’s no antagonist here, heck there isn’t even a specific set of hazards you need to prepare for. This makes some specialized builds mostly useless. A challenge mode would be a nice addition in that regard. The requirements for the final tier of items are very high, so much so that there’s no real point to them except getting them just for the sake of it. It’s preparing for a final challenge that never comes. The story also mostly falls flat. You listen to a bunch of voices trying very hard to convince you that you’re not just a disembodied camera and that the car isn’t actually the only character in the game. It doesn’t really work. I understand the game having no combat, but having something out there, anything, would be nice. I don’t know, an evil car of some sort, or maybe a Sasquatch chasing you out of an area, visibly barreling at you from your rear-view mirror.

Another word about those accessibility settings. You know all those cool things the game does I told you about? Well those are exactly the things you can turn off. Here’s another example: the auto-repair bay is pretty much the final upgrade to your garage because, well, repairing your car is half the game. Building it requires a ton of late-game resources, plus prior research. Guess what? There’s a setting where the game essentially gives you its most valuable prize right from the get-go, with absolutely no consequences. Gee, thanks game.

It all feels like a lack of confidence in the game’s design. And you know what? It doesn’t even work. Despite those dozens of settings, the game received an enormous amount of backlash in the Steam forums because you cannot save at absolutely any time. The devs even wrote a novella-length apology/explanation about how the game doesn’t have the technical capability to save anywhere. Furthermore, in every topic that’s not about saving anywhere, players just keep telling each other to turn off in the settings anything that gives them any problem. You can say what you want about the Souls games, but at least the players spend enormous amounts of time trying to help each other out. This feels like what too much “accessibility” does to a game. Seriously, you can never placate your least engaged players. Never.

Anyway, enough about that. Pacific Drive is still pretty great, but I’m bummed I have this nice souped-up jalopy and nowhere left to go with it. I think there’s definitely potential for DLC to add more variety.