The rain was pouring as game director Alex Dracott drove through the wilderness of the Pacific north-west. There wasn’t anyone in the car with him, but nonetheless, Dracott didn’t feel alone in his trusty station wagon – a dependable, durable vehicle he’d been driving ever since he was a teenager. As the game maker was bludgeoned by the elements, he describes feeling a “camaraderie with the car”, sheltered by its windshield and the metal of its body.
This experience inspired Pacific Drive, the game Dracott has been making for the past three years with his team at Ironwood Studios in Seattle, capital of the famously verdant region. He describes it as a “run-based driving survival game,” played in first-person. You must make it out of an exclusion zone using nothing but your smarts and your beat-up vehicle. There are conspiracies to untangle, anomalies to avoid, supplies to gather and repairs to be made – if you make it back to your garage after each hair-raising excursion.
Pacific Drive is inspired by the Strugatsky brothers’ novel Roadside Picnic, Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Stalker, and Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach trilogy, the last part of which takes place within the pristine Area X, a haven for all manner of strange, seemingly impossible ecological phenomena. He’s heard these works described as “body horror for the planet” which he thinks is “maybe a little extreme”; but they do contain a “ton of mystery and wonderfully weird things”, worlds that behave beyond what their characters can possibly know, expect or imagine.
Dracott calls the car and your relationship with it the “star of the show”, but it’s in the interplay between the vehicle and the untamed setting that the game snaps into full-throttle life. Stricken by radiation, the exclusion zone is full of anomalies: sentient-seeming lightning charges that attach to your car, autonomous flying blades that carve through the turf, sludgy deposits that cake your windows in gunk. Throw in the highly volatile weather, with wind extreme enough to topple trees, and rain so heavy your windscreen wipers cannot clear it, and there’s a cocktail of elements that Dracott and his team can procedurally remix on the fly: “as you start to layer them together, it becomes extra interesting and fun.”
For all Pacific Drive’s literary and arthouse influences, nothing has influenced the game more than the Pacific north-west itself, the region that Dracott grew up in and recently returned to after a stint in California. The area is filled with a special, teeming kind of nature: prehistoric ferns; towering conifers; fauna big and small. It’s home to a plethora of local stories and legends, some of which have made it into the game. In short, he says, it’s more than weird enough without the supernatural elements. One of the aims of his project, he says, is to conjure a virtual space that does justice to its idiosyncratic atmosphere.
Dracott hopes players will be intrigued enough by Pacific Drive’s mystery to keep venturing back out into the zone – and maybe a little scared, too. “We don’t have the intention of jump-scaring the player,” Dracott says. “But everyone has a different tolerance of what’s scary to them, right? For me as an adult, I’m a little bit more comfortable driving around [on my own] than I was growing up. But that’s not to say it doesn’t creep me out sometimes.”