"Upgrades, Upgrades, & More Upgrades": Pacific Drive Hands-On Preview

screenrant.com:

is one of the newest additions to the overloaded survival-crafting genre of games. Many of the games in this genre offer the same thing; little-to-no story and characters who begin with nothing but the ability to ravage the land of all its resources, eventually building an impenetrable shelter to protect themselves from a random threat the world provides. With so many cookie-cutter games being released, it's incredibly nice to sit down and enjoy a story-focused survival game like .

Screen Rant was invited to a hands-on preview of at Gamescom back in August 2023. The debut game from indie developer Ironwood Studios showed off its classic survival-crafting mentality with a few twists. Only five months later the game is set to release in February and we were offered a preview build through Steam. Not much has changed gameplay-wise since the show, but this new build provided a great setup for the story to come.

Players begin as a delivery person who needs to drop off an unknown package near the Olympic Peninsula, an area that was once the staging grounds for new technologies, but was eventually quarantined off by the government because of too many mysterious events happening in the area. As the destination gets closer weird things begin happening — rocks seem to float around the car, and the fabric of reality begins to break apart. Eventually, the player is dragged into this anomaly within the Olympic Exclusion Zone where some mysterious voices guide them to the safety of a garage. This garage is where the real adventure begins.

There was a strong focus on the story throughout the preview build, with companions constantly coming on over the radio explaining what is happening in this place that everyone seems to be stuck in.