In Ironwood Studios’ debut video game Pacific Drive, an unknown phenomena has transformed a big part of the Pacific Northwest into what’s now known as the Olympic Exclusion Zone.
Players are asked to navigate the Zone’s dangers, which include lethal monsters and unpredictable storms, from behind the wheel of an extensively customized station wagon. While your character can get out of your car and even take damage, your survival primarily depends on how well you take care of your car.
Ironwood has variously described Pacific Drive‘s genre as “driving survival” or, more cleverly, a “road-lite.” Each trip through the Exclusion Zone is randomized, so no two players will have the same experience, but you’ll learn and gain something from each failed run.
Pacific Drive was first revealed in 2022 at one of Sony’s State of Play livestreams. It’s the debut project from Ironwood, founded in 2019 and headquartered in Seattle.
Ironwood’s 19-person staff includes studio head Alexander Dracott, formerly of Oculus and Sucker Punch; production director Alyssa Askew, previously with Big Fish and the manager of gaming events for Seattle’s annual GeekGirlCon show; and narrative designer Karrie Shao, a former writer on Riot Games’ League of Legends.
The team at Ironwood includes developers who’ve worked on a number of recently famous games, which ranges from Pacific Northwest projects like Cozy Grove, Halo Infinite, and Infamous: Second Son, to international productions such as BioShock Infinite, Mafia III, and Mortal Kombat 11. For a relatively new indie developer working on its first game, Ironwood has a lot of experience under its hood.
As part of the run-up to Pacific Drive’s launch later this year, Ironwood debuted a behind-the-scenes developer diary, “Tales From the Road,” on Saturday morning as part of GamesRadar’s Summer Games Fest.
“Initially, [Pacific Drive] was very much a personal thing,” Dracott says in the diary. “I grew up driving station wagons around the Pacific Northwest.”
“As an adult, I decided to start doing that again… I would go to abandoned industrial sites, taking the car up up these tiny little dirt trails, and there was this vibe, of being out there in the woods with this old car, a surreal experience. That became the initial seed of the game.”
As part of that, Pacific Drive has been built to cause the player to develop a “sense of companionship with their car,” in Dracott’s terms. The Zone is made to be a lonely place, without any other humans around, so your car is both your vehicle and your only partner.
In between runs, you can venture on foot into the abandoned landscape of the Exclusion Zone, to search for resources and materials that you can use to fix your trusty car. In garages, you can craft and install parts and upgrades, in order to get increasingly further into the Zone and figure out what’s happened to the Pacific Northwest.
Pacific Drive is planned for release later in 2023, on the PlayStation 5, Steam, and the Epic Games Store.
