To survive the marauding Pacific Drive, you’ll need to keep your paranormal station wagon in good shape. You’re constantly repairing corroded doors and swapping out broken engine parts with scavenged tech. But maybe all that tinkering was a bit too much. Our review praised the game for its “tons of atmosphere,” but called the constant need to craft things “tedious.” If you felt that way, that’s good news. The update now allows for a massive change in difficulty, according to developer Ironwood Studios, making the game easier to play and significantly reducing the need to craft things.
But… if you think the game isn’t difficult enough, you can now check the box that will make hitting the trunk lid cause your death.
Most of the changes are listed in the trailer above, and are detailed in Steam update post. But to give you a rundown, there are now a ton of recent difficulty settings. For example, “Scenic Drive” lowers the crafting requirements and makes death impossible. While “Joyride” keeps the deadly threat but minimizes the threats and says that “collecting, crafting, and research requirements are lowered.”
If you’re currently screaming “NO, THIS BANJAXED CAR IS A WHOLE PIECE OF WONDER.” Well, first of all, wow, relax. Second, this update also offers some seriously challenging presets as a contrast. “Olympic Gauntlet” increases the difficulty of everything—hazards, crafting, car damage, you name it. “Iron Wagon” makes everything similarly challenging, but also notes that “failure to do so will result in your save file being deleted.”
There’s also a “Mechanic’s Road Trip” option that says, “Terrain and car condition have a greater impact on driving. Car repair items are more expensive to produce and can’t be crafted while driving.” It sounds like someone took an important-looking cylinder out of a roguelike’s hood and mounted My Summer Car right into the engine block.
You can also go wild on a few of the difficulty sliders, the developers say, and create your own custom mode. For example, your tires can now be flatter, and your radiation more radioactive. You can turn off the “instability storms” that threaten your ride. Or you can make your engine make a more “wrum-wrum” sound. Then there’s that deadly trunk I mentioned at the beginning of the article—an option titled “Trunk Bonk Kills.” Don’t laugh! Car trunks are perilous. A friend of mine gave his girlfriend a concussion on a date by absentmindedly slamming the trunk while she was still looking for something. They got married and had kids. It’s possible that concussions are the cause.
There are other changes in the update. You can now play your music on your car stereo and garage jukebox by loading the files directly into a local folder in your game directory. That’s chilly. An underrated strength of this road-tripping roguelike was its soundtrack, which had some pretty good melodies (my favorite is Bloodoath by Exes & Petey).
I really enjoyed the pace of creation when I was playing Pacific Drive, but it’s true that it slowed me down enough that I lost momentum and didn’t finish the game. Difficulty is difficult to measure, and often one of the best things you can do is simply give the players the gist of the decision. So fair play.
Disclosure: Paul Dean, a former RPS contributor and my former board game buddy, used to write for Pacific Drive. That explains why this is so weird.