Pacific Drive is based on the novel Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, its film adaptation Stalker and the film S. T. A. L. K. E. R. , the games they inspired, as well as Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach series and its film adaptation, Annihilation. The action takes place in the Olympic Exclusion Zone. , a fictional region of the Pacific Northwest that has been the scene of government experiments that have fundamentally altered the legislation of reality.
Since then, the government has cordoned off the entire domain with monolithic concrete walls many meters high. The interior of the Zone is populated by harmful “anomalies” that are difficult to describe. Some are inanimate items that come to life, like circular steel balls called rabbits that roll and jump in a circular quest to attach themselves to your car, or crash-test dummies called tourists that can move when you’re not chasing them. Others are trees made up of speakers that heal your car with soothing sounds, or colorful wind currents. that alter the driving controls.
Basically, the game is about driving, with its survival elements abstracted from the same old demands of eating and resting, and instead concentrating on keeping the car in good shape. Glued to the wall, you head to the Zone in search of the fabrics you need. However, you stay too long in one place, and the physical global can simply rewrite itself around you – and rewrite you with it.
For Dracott, Pacific Drive’s spooky environment is subjective. He drew on fond memories and reports from the Oregon and Washington woods to expand the game; Wandering in the woods doesn’t scare him. On the other hand, he says, he’s afraid of water. One man’s constant source of dread is another’s delightful ride in his familiar van.
That said, just because they don’t consider what they’ve created to be horror doesn’t mean that the creators of Pacific Drive didn’t intentionally try to upset.
“Tension was vital, wasn’t it? We were very aware early on of the kind of environment we were creating,” Dracott continued. “It’s a matter of thinking about how much we’re going to do then, because of lack of energy. “In other words, ‘skipping’ the player and leaning into it, which we did in a matter of moments, no doubt. “
Pacific Drive may not be a horror game in the same old sense, but it can tap into some of the same sentiments, said game director and lead designer Seth Rosen, especially since the Olympic Exclusion Zone is meant to be a very contradictory place. with the global as we know it.
“We wanted it to be a somewhat menacing environment, but not necessarily an environment of absolute terror,” Rosen explained. “You deserve to feel like you’re being threatened and that there are things that you don’t understand, which creates that sense of being in danger, and that’s where a lot of our specific ‘horror’ logo comes from, I think. We weren’t trying, you know, to create a game where blood runs down the walls and all kinds of packed scenes. -Full-blown horror experiences. But you can elicit many of the same feelings simply by keeping the player on their toes. And to take them and keep them in that kind of intellectual state where they don’t necessarily feel like they can accept it as true with their senses. . »
The truth about the Pacific Drive game is that developer Ironwood Studios probably would have done too clever a job of making its surroundings almost provocative and creepy. A lot of that feeling depends on the sound design, which is wonderful throughout the game. A big component of what makes anomalies seem supernatural is the way they sound.
Em Halberstadt, art director of the game’s sound design studio A Shell in the Pit, responsible for the audio direction of Pacific Drive, explained that the sonic technique of the anomalies was fostered through the appearance of each of them, merging the use of genuine sound. fabrics (the crackle of electrical energy for charged fogs or arc towers, sticky whistles for acid-based hazards) with more disturbing elements. For the rabbit anomaly (the aforementioned fast-moving steel ball), the sound design was decided through the sound of the anomaly.
“When we designed the anomalies, we had an idea of how harmful each one was and we added techniques that we used to make you uncomfortable, the more harmful something is, so you don’t need to stay there,” Halberstadt said. if the high frequencies made us a little more uncomfortable. So, for example, the rabbits, when they jump on you, it’s one of the moments of maximum competition and it’s a very high-pitched cry, which is also a human voice, which is also a human voice.
There are also plenty of satisfied injuries that seem to have combined to give Pacific Drive its express vibe. For one thing, as Rosen explained, because the number one way to interact with hazards is to avoid them or move away from them, anomalies had to be designed in such a way that they were temporarily readable and remotely navigable, before reaching them. This means that anomaly-like sounds can be heard over long distances, Halberstadt explained.
However, one of the consequences of those potential design choices is that when you get out of your car, run to ransack a house, or salvage metal, you may hear anomalies you don’t see. And while the sounds in both anomalies are explicit and meant to express the danger they pose to you, I’ve found that hearing them out of context occasionally leaves me and disorients me. This soundscape adds to the tension, strangeness, and vulnerability you feel both in one moment and the other when you step out. of the car.
The car can also add to the strangeness of the situation. Pacific Drive is designed to put the car at the center of the experience. You move through the game from a first-person perspective, but the car is your home, your safety. , and his companion. Halberstadt said the team worked to convey that feeling through sound design by cutting out things like the pitch of sounds or their intensity when you’re in the car. But that sense of safety in the car contrasts with that of risk when you get out of it, and all the decisions that make being in the car safer make the outside world even more caring.
The creepy nature of sound design is rarely as incidental as some of those design elements might lead you to believe. There’s also this weird mermaid I heard in the woods, the one that’s unsettling enough to get under my skin. Sound, the team explained, is rarely closely tied to an express threat: along with other similar sounds, they exist in particular to charge the game’s unnatural atmosphere. Dracott said senior sound designer Egan Budd, who worked on the sounds, on the project focused especially on opting for elements that wouldn’t be easily identifiable. The team also decided not to integrate those sounds into the ambient background, but to assign them express positions, so that it would seem like something was creating them.
“The contrast between the global herbal is why they paint so well,” Halberstadt said. “I think the fact that they’re metallic and buzzing, and all those weird fabrics that don’t belong in a forest, adds to the unsettling, scary feeling. atmosphere. And I’m also thinking about randomness. The fact that we’ve set others up to appear at other times in other spaces in the Zone, at other levels, so you never know, there’s no trend between them. And I think you need there to be a trend. You try to attach them, but it doesn’t stick to anything, and anything in our brain doesn’t like that. Just the fact that they’re something you can’t explain, because that’s a kind of what the Zone is.
While Pacific Drive comprises elements of a horror game, it’s a car game without being one. The anomalies, which range from inexplicable fields of electrical fog to inexplicably animated piles of metal, don’t resemble the fatal monsters of a horror game. , they look more like animals. Some might try to pull you away from your car for a moment or two, or run away with a headlight or door, and while some might hurt you, they act more like obstacles than predators. But it’s clear to everyone around Pacific Drive that you’ll never face the same kind of danger as in other games. Even though those terrifying noises in the distance made the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end, I knew that no vicious creature would come and pull. Pull me out of the woods with teeth and claws.
The result is what could almost be called a comfortable or bloodless technique in the face of horror: a pervasive sense of being frightened in an unnatural and even harmful place, without the oppressive, oppressive sense of a genuine threat.
Pacific Drive conveys this more relaxed tone in a number of ways. The game’s narrative is largely conveyed through scientists who stayed in the Zone to examine it after the government evacuated it years earlier, giving much of the debate a comedic tone. The small cast is never surprised by the lethality of the Zone, even if you’re sent to do things like throw your car off a bridge as part of an experiment.
You can also sing along to your car radio to listen to the music from the game’s soundtrack, which is made up of folk and soothing themes, accentuating the feeling of “driving through the woods” while undermining the “impossible realm that defies nature’s legislation. “aspect.
As you progress through your exploration of the Zone, you’ll be able to unlock stretches of road that serve as shortcuts to travel longer distances with fewer stops, and offer a more comfortable and less damaging opportunity to simply drive. Between trips, you return to your garage, an eminently safe place, to store and upgrade your car, and the fantasy of being a mechanic driving a vehicle you know very well is a big component of the gaming experience. The garage even comprises an anomaly of its own: a friendly dumpster that will spit out production components, waiting for everything you want but don’t have for your current project.
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