Pacific Drive game review: haunting and foreboding

We're spoilt in most driving games, all of which seem keen to fill our garages with hundreds of different cars. But unless you're a tech billionaire, that's not a terribly relatable depiction of car ownership. Pacific Drive, a haunting survival game set in the Pacific Northwest, gives you just one car and you are guaranteed to fall in love with it.

It's partly because cowering inside this battered, wood-panelled station wagon is your best shot at surviving the bizarre, destructive anomalies you'll encounter in the mysterious Olympic Exclusion Zone. It's also because as the game progresses you'll have built it into a formidable, radiation resistant, loot-detecting battle wagon using little more than spit and chickenwire.

The bad news is that for a ready supply of that spit and chickenwire, you have to head out on sorties into the zone, which shifts and changes every time you go on an expedition. This perpetually gloomy portion of Washington State is filled with bizarre anomalies ready to turn you inside out in a variety of colourful ways. This makes scavenging a tense, creepy affair as you leave the relative safety of your car to strip derelict vehicles for parts, siphon fuel and explore outposts that have been abandoned for decades. There's an enormously satisfying loop as you nervously strike out in your beloved wagon to find materials, then return to the safety of your garage to upgrade the vehicle to better withstand your next outing.

The most authentic representation of second hand car ownership, though, is the quirks system, where prolonged exposure to the zone causes your car to develop... eccentricities. It might suddenly start sounding the horn every time you close the boot or toggling the headlights when you charge the battery. You then have to head to a repair terminal in the garage and correctly diagnose the problem, get it right and the terminal will tell you what you need to craft to fix it. It's a bit like typing your problem into the search bar in an owners' forum, only with a greater imminent threat of death.

Pacific Drive is a unique driving game and, in spite of its relentless weirdness, one that captures the connection between human and automobile better than most videogames we've played. Combine that with a vast vehicle upgrade system an atmosphere more foreboding than a dentist's waiting room and you have all the makings of a cult classic.