Fishing at Willow Creek
Bobcat Edition
Newsletter #101
I spent a vast swath of my weekend with recent indie game Pacific Drive. Like many of my favorite created things, it’s hard to classify. I suppose its closest genre ilk would be weird fiction or other similar brands of science fiction. There are healthy measures of the Strugatsky brothers and Lovecraft, of Bradbury’s October Country and King’s haunted New England, all transplanted to the old, dark forests of the Pacific Northwest. This isn’t a cruise through wine country, or a visit to the urban cathedrals where grunge was born. Instead, Pacific Drive’s eponymous roadtrip(s) take place along rural stretches of tangled highway, where you’re as like to see a sasquatch as a flannel shirt.
Pacific Drive’s loop is pretty simple: using your weird science garage as a base, you launch expeditions into the Olympic Exclusion Zone at the helm of your trusty station wagon. Each expedition involves you venturing into this zone to explore routes, gather materials, and research new technology that you can use to improve the station wagon and thus go further and gather more on subsequent longer, more difficult expeditions. I’m not typically a fan of survival crafting games, but those elements in Pacific Drive remain minimal; there’s a lot of crafting, but blessedly little survival, none of which involves eating or drinking to top off constantly ticking meters. Instead, most of what amounts to survival revolves around minimizing your character’s contact with the Zone’s “anomalous” energy - essentially radiation - lest it scramble your atoms and send you back to your last saved checkpoint. It’s easy, for the most part, to avoid this energy, so the majority of each expedition is a relaxing drive into weird country.
Without spoiling too much, the real draw to the game is its atmosphere and lore. The simplistic loop allows the player’s attention to go to the narrative crumbs left along the route in all the expeditions. While there’s a traditional narrative centered and delivered to the player via excellent voice-acted chatter on the in-game radio, the deeper story - the lore - keeps me coming back and going out into the dark country, looking for piecemeal clues to the nefariously mad scientific schemes that gave birth to the Exclusion Zone. Much like the Zone in the Strugatskys’ Roadside Picnic, the Olympic Exclusion Zone is a place where things have happened and those things are strange. It’s not the newest idea in narrative, was already millennia old when the Strugatskys lit upon the notion for their banned masterpiece. It’s not the idea itself that has to be novel, however, but its execution, and Pacific Drive takes familiar narrative and familiar game mechanics and recontextualizes them against the uncertainty of moving through a liminal space writ large. This, in and of itself, reveals the simple brilliance at the heart of the game - it’s really a game about life, the ultimate liminal space, a long hallway between birth and death.
That’s not meant to be a sad or even depressing thing; if nothing else, the game presents a fantastic metaphorical argument for perseverance. Pacific Drive sees you persisting - via first person gameplay - on one journey after another into mercurial, dangerous environs, a wilderness of dimensional tears and unlikely creatures wandering alien landscapes. Nothing is certain, everything is changing, and the road might fall away beneath you. Just around the next dangerous corner, though, there may be wonders worth seeing, and that’s why we keep going. That’s what makes the trip worth it. I can’t imagine a better way of looking at life.
Have a good week, y’all. Keep going when you think you can’t, because you never know what or who might be around the next corner. Thank y’all for reading!
Wado!