Time flies when you're driving. It's somehow already been a year since Pacific Drive launched and became my favorite survival game of 2024. And in those 12 months a whole lotta people have gotten behind the wheel: according to publisher Kepler Interactive, the driving survival game has sold over a million copies.
I'm not really surprised: with Pacific Drive, developer Ironwood Studios have created the best car in videogame history (I know there may be objections to this statement, but I am steadfast). Somehow, an unassuming station wagon becomes not just a loyal companion but a quirky, speedy tank bristling with sci-fi gizmos, the result of excursions into the weird and creepy exclusion zone filled with bizarre anomalies.
What makes Pacific Drive such an interesting survival experience is that most of the usual survival systems aren't attached to you, but your car. Instead of drinking and eating, you fill your car with gas and keep its battery charged. Every single component is like a vital organ: the doors, bumpers, hoods, panels, tires, and windows all have their own individual health meters. And unlike your body in most survival games, car parts will eventually become so damaged they simply need to be replaced. You can patch punctured tires repeatedly, but the treads will eventually go bald, and there's no fix for that. Harsh, but fair.
And then there's the quirks, the result of exposing your trusty ride to the questionable physics and alarming electrical fields of the zone. It's a bit like your car gets occasionally haunted: you'll come back from a drive and notice something weird, like every time you open the trunk, the horn sounds. There's a fun diagnostics minigame that involves figuring out what weird tic your car has picked up and then describing it to your garage computer to find a cure.
Yeah, great game, great car, so I'm not surprised to learn a million people have taken Pacific Drive for a spin. And it's a great time to hit that milestone, almost exactly a year after its launch, because there's a nice bonus for those who haven't played it yet: Pacific Drive is currently 40% off.
That means it's only $18 on Steam, though that discount is gonna expire in about 17 hours from the time I'm writing this. So, if the time you're reading this is 16 hours and 59 minutes after that, that means you have only one minute left to buy it on sale. Hurry! Don't even read the rest of this sentence. Or this one! There's no time. Here's Pacific Drive on Steam.
