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Closing the car boot on your head will now kill you in Pacific DriveOh, and a bunch of other difficulty options
Oh, and a bunch of other difficulty options
Image credit:Ironwood Studios
Image credit:Ironwood Studios
To survive in looter-booterPacific Driveyou have to keep the paranormal station wagon you drive around in good nick. You’re constantly repairing corroded doors and swapping out busted engine parts with cobbled-together technology. But maybe this tinkering was a little too much. Ourreviewpraised the game for its “trunk loads of atmosphere” but called the constant need to craft stuff “laborious”. If you also felt this, then good news. An update now lets you fiddle the difficulty options a generous amount, say developers Ironwood Studios, making the game easier and bringing crafting needs right down.
Buuut… if you thought the opposite - that the game wasn’t hard enough - you can now tick a box that makes hitting yourself with the trunk door kill you stone dead.
Pacific Drive | Drive Your Way Fall 2024 UpdateWatch on YouTube
Pacific Drive | Drive Your Way Fall 2024 Update
Most of the changes are mentioned in the trailer above, and detailed in full inan update post on Steam. But to give you a summary, there are now a bunch of fresh difficulty presets. “Scenic Drive” lowers crafting requirements and makes it impossible to die, for example. While “Joyride” keeps the mortal threat but minimises hazards and says that “gathering, crafting, and research requirements are all lowered.”
If you are currently screaming “NO, THE BANJAXED CAR IS THE WHOLE POINT.” Then, firstly, wow, relax. Secondly, this update also offers some very challenging presets as a contrast. “OlympicGauntlet” ups the difficulty of everything - hazards, crafting, car damage, you name it. “Iron Wagon” makes everything similarly tough but also notes that “failing a run will delete your save file.”
I quite liked the pace of crafting when I toyed with Pacific Drive, but it’s true it slowed me down enough to lose momentum and not finish the game. Difficulty is tough to measure, and often one of the best things you can do is just hand the nitty-gritty of that decision straight to the players. So fair play.
Disclosure: Paul Dean, a former contributor to RPS and my former fellow-in-board-games, did some writing for Pacific Drive. This explains why it’s so weird.
