The Near-Horror of Pacific Drive

Pacific Drive is one of my favorite releases this year. In so many ways it is a wonderfully crafted experience that bears playing out. I do not particularly care about spoilers, but for this specific game I find that part of the game's joy is in experiencing it for yourself. So while I'm going to talk about Pacific Drive and do some spoiler-y things, if you were thinking of playing this game I can't recommend it enough. 

So, horror in games feels quite defined as a genre. Thanks to so many games being inspired by Silent Hill 1 and 2, the DNA of Silent Hill and by extension Jacob's Ladder is infused into horror games and we see a lot of these elements repeated. The big twist that has to recontextualize the whole story. Themes of guilt and/or trauma. Enemies that might have smudged featureless faces or do the head-jitter thing from Jacob's Ladder. Decaying industrial environments. Some form of body horror involved. Growing tension that is almost always released by some kind of loud and surprising noise or thing springing out at you- Usually a jump scare, but doesn’t have to be.  Perhaps it's to the detriment of horror that it feels so recognizable to be playing a horror game.

Incidentally if you haven’t seen Jacob’s Ladder I do recommend you check it out. It still holds up and I thought the movie’s biggest problem was suffering from success if anything. It was such an inspiration to something that reshaped a whole genre. But a whole lot about the first two Silent Hill games will fall into place after you watch it. 

One of the things that fascinated me about Pacific Drive was that the game provided me with a sense of horror, but otherwise was free of the trappings of the genre. It is not a “horror game” in the sense that you’ll see if you look up that genre on Steam, and it’s not a horror game in the sense that I think the developers set out with an intent to primarily scare the player, and yet it is still unsettling and sometimes scary. 

If you've missed learning about Pacific Drive, I'll let its store description speak: 

Pacific Drive is a first-person driving survival game with your car as your only companion. Navigate a surreal reimagining of the Pacific Northwest, and face supernatural dangers as you venture into the Olympic Exclusion Zone. Each excursion into the wilderness brings unique and strange challenges as you restore and upgrade your car from an abandoned garage that acts as your home base. Gather precious resources and investigate what’s been left behind in the Zone; unravel a long-forgotten mystery while learning exactly what it takes to survive in this unpredictable, hostile environment.

It's you and a station wagon against the world. So what brings this game to the edge of horror?

The Mystery

Something, something, oldest fear is of the unknown so says Howard Poward Lovecraft. And when you approach the game blind, there is so much unknown to be feared. What will the hazards do? What will this environmental condition do? What does "Meteor Storm" mean anyway? There's a particular emotion that I feel when I see something new and different in a game and find myself keeping still to watch while curiosity and fear battle it out in my head. What will that floating hunk of metal do if I get close? What makes this entity different from the ones in previous areas? 

That immediate mystery, of what the anomalies you face can or will do, is one of the strengths. But there is also a simmering mystery tied to the setting in the background. What made the Olympic Exclusion Zone like this? Everyone is cagey about why it's like this, why the government sealed this peninsula off with concrete walls hundreds of feet tall.

Mystery is one of the understated ingredients to fear, I believe. As much as we collectively (and not undeservedly) rag on CinemaSins, if it is not handled with utmost care I think that “solving” horror into fixed, logical steps can be a detriment. Not all horror stands up to endlessly describing it into discrete steps. The Andromeda Strain comes to mind as something where tension is created by analyzing something as deeply as possible, but one of the big things from the book is that the microorganism they’re studying keeps making wild adaptations that defy the scientist’s ability to predict. To embrace the unfamiliar and leave these moments of mystery and unknown is one of the game’s big strengths. 

It’s not as though Pacific Drive leaves everything unstated or is changing things behind the scenes. You get a scan visor and can scan just about everything you come across to learn more about it and get a hint at what it does. But being introduced to the world through these little mysteries and unknowns sets a tone in my mind that stays with me through the game. Knowing that this is a game world of mysteries to be solved did stay with me through the whole thing. 

The Isolation

Pacific Drive does have characters, and it was a delight to experience the story since I found the voice actors did an outstanding job. But they are voices over your transmitter. It’s not as though you’ve got NPCs you’re meeting face to face or have anyone with you in the car when you’re on an expedition into the Zone. 

I have not yet been to the Pacific Northwest myself, so I’ve never experienced driving through the empty forest roads that inspired this game. But I have been on back country roads in the Texas hill country after dark, when there is no glow of civilization on the horizon and the only illumination is the patch of road under your headlights and the fences and or trees on either side and outside of that small pool of light is nothing but darkness such that you might almost believe the world falls away into nothingness in the darkness. 

So, I get it that the right drive really moves you. Not to mention that this is a game of strange lights moving behind the trees and odd noises echoing down the mountainside. 

There are anomalies that are animate, and maybe even seem to have some kind of will. But nothing recognizable, nothing that has a pair of eyes to look into or a biological need that it acts on. You are alone in what is now an alien environment.

At least until a Tourist sneaks up behind you.

The Powerlessness

This is billed as a survival game, and yes scavenging resources is the major gameplay loop. But you are always a part of this environment, you never stand above it. 

When I say that you don’t punch a tree in this game, I mean that you’re not shaping this environment to your will. You get to modify your home base garage, yes. But once you are out in the Zone you are at the mercy of the terrain. Swamp in the way? Forest blocking you? Didn’t bring your mud tires? Tough. 

Neither are you ever going to subdue an Anomaly with violence. There’s not a Cyberdemon to shoot until it dies, and the Anomalies you do physically strike have less of an “I’m going to beat you up and take your stuff” intention and more of a “Hey. Hey get off. Get off my car. C’mon. Stop that.” 

I don’t know if it happens as much any more, but I remember the era when Amnesia: The Dark Descent released as being one where there was some debate about what the combat in a horror game should look like, if you even think it should have combat. How do you make combat functional without the player feeling so empowered that it works against the tension of the game? How do you intensify combat without turning into a slog? Yes I’m looking at you Bloober Team. If your tools for dealing with encounters become running and hiding instead of pulling out a gun and double-tapping the faceless but bodacious nurse, isn’t that better for horror?

Your “weapons” in Pacific Drive are experience and knowledge. You cannot inflict violence on the Anomalies like they can on you. 

In addition you can rarely ever rest on your laurels and preparation. Virtually everything on your car and every piece of equipment has a durability meter and is constantly being worn down. Perhaps it can be repaired, and the loose bolts or cracks fixed, but everything eventually will simply be too worn to be worth fixing again. On normal difficulty settings you probably won’t end up in some kind of spiral towards a failure state. But you don’t have room to be truly comfortable. 

The Intensifying Desolation

Pacific Drive isn’t a horror game, but it is evocative of the horror that you might feel when you look at the aftermath of a wildfire ripping through a neighborhood or when you see a bombed out city. 

The Zone is dotted with homes for you to scavenge from, but these people did not drift away on their own. The government forced them out with eminent domain and the people who lingered or snuck back in left accusatory graffiti on the walls that set a grim mood for you to explore in. And the outer zone is relatively normal. A weird section of forest, but there’s still grass and trees and flowers. But once you cross the threshold?

You enter a poisoned landscape. Discolored, sickly, or dead vegetation. Greater radiation, greater acidic hazards. The new resources are strange growths sprouting off of dead trees or rusted cars. An environment far more hostile to human life, looking as if an alien world is encroaching onto it and forcing out everything of earth. 

And then you go even further into a dead, bleak wasteland. Now nothing grows. Now everything has become twisted and corrupted. 

One of my favorite things they’ve done with the story is that the characters you’re dealing with are all insiders to the super-science research that made the Zone the way it is. They might have guilt over what they’ve done, but not fresh eyes on it. But you can pick up a sequence of investigative reports from a journalist outside the Zone who tried to break through the government cover-up and some of the accounts are haunting. 

Everything that is wrong with the Zone was ultimately caused by human hands and the further you explore the more that wrongness grows. 

The Separation From Horror

And yet, Pacific Drive is not a horror game. Even if it has the elements and can be horrifying I liken it more to a haunted house where the actors aren’t allowed to touch the guests. There’s little malice from the Anomalies, they are rarely out to harm you. Even the ones that actively interfere with you seem like they’re doing it out of amusement. When an Abductor grabs your car it sounds like it’s chuckling to itself. And even the most obviously creepy of the Anomalies, the Tourists, don’t really have aggressive behaviors. Sometimes they’ll ruin your run when you back up into one, but sometimes they can even be helpful. 

You get a little taste of the horror of indifference, but there is little reason to truly fear. You receive a taste of powerlessness and desperation. A vision of decay. But while the Zone has no interest in keeping you alive it also can’t be said to be actively seeking your death. As soon as you’re inside you meet characters who have stayed in the Zone and know how to survive in it, a clear signal that you can do the same.