Pacific Drive will make you fall in love with an old station wagon

polygon.com:

Ironwood Studios’ Pacific Drive is a road trip game about taking a drive through a disintegrating, irradiated reality; it’s as if American Truck Simulator was set in a lonely, survivalist version of Fallout. Transported — either accidentally or on purpose, it’s not clear — into the Olympic Exclusion Zone somewhere among the wooded slopes of the Pacific Northwest, the nameless player character must pilot a dilapidated station wagon deeper into this territory, where gravity and matter obey their own rules.

Pacific Drive is not really about driving, although it is about the car. In a preview build covering the game’s first few hours, the game had a nitty-gritty loop of looting, crafting, and exploration, reminiscent perhaps of No Man’s Sky on harder difficulty settings, where the primary goal is gathering enough material to patch up your retro wagon just enough to make the next few miles. Eventually, you will begin to improve your car — transforming this rusting heap, with its missing panels and cardboard-box storage, into a custom exploration vehicle for the end of the world, loaded with Mad Max-style welded armor and homebrew technology straight out of Ghostbusters.

The design of Pacific Drive borrows some elements from roguelites, too. The game consists of a series of runs from the same starting point: a shelter/garage where you can park, modify, recharge, and refuel your vehicle. Each run takes you through randomized “junction” areas on your way to a mission destination, at which point your only option is to trigger a “gateway” — a giant, raging beam of light that pierces the earth — and drive into it to return home and start again. Holding your car together through each of these journeys, and returning with enough