The open road. The breeze in your hair. A leisurely drive through a reimagining of the Pacific Northwest of the '90s, complete with a stunning landscape, from the front seat of an old school station wagon. That’s what Ironwood Studios’ debut indie, Pacific Drive, has to offer. Well, that and an ever-twisting visage marred by radiation and instability that creates haunting anomalies that want to absolutely ruin your trip.
But who hasn’t had a literal nightmare take over their road trip?
Surviving the Olympic Exclusion Zone with your trusty station wagon
Pacific Drive is a first-person survival horror experience where you, the player, have breached the Olympic Exclusion Zone — a fictional reimagining of the Pacific Northwest that has become altered by strange anomalies. It’s the year 1998, and you’re seemingly all alone except for your vehicle, which you promptly crash in cinematic fashion. Stranded in the redwood forests of the OEZ, you stumble through the woods until you come upon a broken-down station wagon abandoned in a shed.
The Olympic Exclusion Zone is unstable after being the site of experimentation at the hands of a secretive organization known as ARDA. Though ARDA is no longer present in the Exclusion Zone, the remains of its secretive activities are everywhere. Surreal anomalies litter the roadsides, lurking overhead as some seemingly sentient, floating scrap piles or unsettling mannequins that you could just swear moved a little when you weren’t looking. The effects of ARDA testing have led to an unstable world that shifts and changes before your very eyes, and many things left behind no longer work like they used to.
At first glance, the station wagon is giving you Forza Horizon’s barn-finds energy. It's dusty, rusted, and missing a tire. But it does start, and after replacing the bum tire and siphoning some gas from nearby rust buckets, you’re able to roll it back out onto the highway to resume your aimless wandering in these creepy woods. There’s no flashy paint job here, though. This is about survival.
The car’s radio picks up some voices over the air waves, and it’s the first time you realize that you’re not entirely alone in the OEZ. The voice, a man named Tobias, is shocked at your ability to locate a functional car — or “remnant” as he calls it.
With Tobias’ help, you can make your way past the early horrors you encounter to reach a mechanic’s garage that will serve as your home base. Oppy, the owner of the garage, does not seem amused at the idea of you touching her stuff, but she reluctantly signs on to help you on your journey after some coaxing from Tobias.
Oppy’s garage provides access to useful tools, junk vehicles that you can harvest parts from, and even a friendly dumpster outback that occasionally regurgitates vital resources like chemicals and tires.
Oppy and Tobias guide you through your first round of upgrades on the station wagon, the installation of some unique and powerful tech that Oppy has developed for surviving trips out into the OEZ, and important maintenance. Your wagon is your lifeline, shield, and best friend when you head out on procedurally generated adventures into the Zone, and your survival depends entirely on that station wagon and your maintenance of it.
Each trek out into the Zone is different from the one before it, and the anomalies lurking in the treelines pose different threats. As you explore the Zone, you can uncover the secrets of ARDA and the experiments they performed that led to the instability.
Once you’ve completed your current to-do list for your run, you have the option to utilize dangerous technology to open a portal back to the safety of your garage. This way, you can upgrade and repair before you head back out to continue your journey.
A former PlayStation exclusive, available now on Xbox Game Pass
Pacific Drive is the first title released by Seattle-based Ironwood Studios, which began development on the survival horror road trip shortly after the studio’s founding by industry veterans in 2019. Ironwood Studios partnered with Kepler Interactive to publish Pacific Drive on PC and PlayStation in 2024, signing a timed exclusivity agreement with the latter that initially kept the game from releasing on Xbox consoles.
Now that the exclusivity agreement with Sony has lapsed, Ironwood Studios and Kepler Interactive have brought Pacific Drive to Xbox — and it comes with a few extras to make up for the wait. The game is an Xbox Play Anywhere title, supporting cross-platform entitlements. Purchase Pacific Drive on Xbox and you own it not just on console but also on your Windows 11 devices via the Xbox PC app or Microsoft Store. The same is also true in reverse, and support for Xbox Cloud Gaming also means that you can stream the game on your mobile devices.
Pacific Drive also launched day one on Xbox Game Pass, meaning you take your trusty station wagon out for a tour of the OEZ as part of your subscription plan on console and PC alike. The Xbox release lined up with the launch of a brand-new expansion for Pacific Drive, titled Whispers in the Woods, that also added a brand-new storyline featuring a strange cult within the OEZ with 8-12 more hours of gameplay.
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