To survive in looter-booter Pacific Drive you have to keep the paranormal station wagon you drive around in good nick. You’re constantly repairing corroded doors and swapping out busted engine parts with cobbled-together technology. But maybe this tinkering was a little too much. Our review praised the game for its “trunk loads of atmosphere” but called the constant need to craft stuff “laborious”. If you also felt this, then good news. An update now lets you fiddle the difficulty options a generous amount, say developers Ironwood Studios, making the game easier and bringing crafting needs right down.
Buuut… if you thought the opposite – that the game wasn’t hard enough – you can now tick a box that makes hitting yourself with the trunk door kill you stone dead.
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Most of the changes are mentioned in the trailer above, and detailed in full in an update post on Steam. But to give you a summary, there are now a bunch of fresh difficulty presets. “Scenic Drive” lowers crafting requirements and makes it impossible to die, for example. While “Joyride” keeps the mortal threat but minimises hazards and says that “gathering, crafting, and research requirements are all lowered.”
If you are currently screaming “NO, THE BANJAXED CAR IS THE WHOLE POINT.” Then, firstly, wow, relax. Secondly, this update also offers some very challenging presets as a contrast. “Olympic Gauntlet” ups the difficulty of everything – hazards, crafting, car damage, you name it. “Iron Wagon” makes everything similarly tough but also notes that “failing a run will delete your save file.”
There is also the “Mechanic’s Road Trip” option, which states: “Terrain and the status of the car impact driving more. Items to repair the car are more costly to craft, and can’t be crafted on a run.” Which sounds like somebody took an important-looking cylinder out of the roguelike’s bonnet and installed My Summer Car straight into the engine block.
You can also go crazy on a bunch of difficulty sliders, say the devs, and create your own custom mode. Your flat tires can now be flatter, for example, and the radiation more radioactive. You could turn off the “instability storms” that threaten you during a run. Or you could make your engine go more vroom-vroom. There’s also that fatal car boot I mentioned at the start of the article – an option titled: “Trunk Bonk kills”. Don’t laugh! Car boots are dangerous. My friend concussed a girl while on a date by absent-mindedly slamming the boot down while she was still looking for something. They got married and had babies. It is possible the concussion is to blame.
There are other changes in the update. You can now have your own music play through the car radio, and your garage’s jukebox, by loading the files directly into a local folder in the game directory. That’s cool. An undersung strength of the road-tripping roguelike was its soundtrack, which had some pretty good tunes (my favourite is Bloodoath by Exes & Petey).
I quite liked the pace of crafting when I toyed with Pacific Drive, but it’s true it slowed me down enough to lose momentum and not finish the game. Difficulty is tough to measure, and often one of the best things you can do is just hand the nitty-gritty of that decision straight to the players. So fair play.
Disclosure: Paul Dean, a former contributor to RPS and my former fellow-in-board-games, did some writing for Pacific Drive. This explains why it’s so weird.
