Pacific Drive

This is a roguelike game with procedurally generated levels. The basic idea is that you are trapped in a region of the US Pacific Northwest where reality itself is unstable and the landscape is constantly warping. In order to explore it and eventually find a way out, you need to venture deeper and deeper into the zone using a special station wagon that you outfit and maintain to carry you through various obstacles and dangers. First of all, points for originality. Pacific Drive does a lot of things that are at least conceptually novel, from the close relationship you're forced to have with your car, to the fusion of an ambient mildly horrific atmosphere and the romanticism of the road trip. You can spend a good 40 minutes or so in your garage tending to your car, fixing up parts, installing new ones, packing provisions, and planning your route, all while punkish rock music blares in the background. And then you venture out into the zone and find yourself in a place that's often a bit creepy, often a bit haunting, and rarely not dangerous, all while uncertain if and how you'll be able to return. It handles this vibe pretty well, I think. It's not without its shortcomings, though. My biggest issue with the game I think is that most of the ways it finds to trip you up or increase the difficulty of a situation basically involve making things more annoying for you. That's mostly how I felt, I was just annoyed by all the little niggling obstacles the game would throw up to add pressure or make things harder. This is how I feel about every single enemy in the game, as well as most of the terrain obstacles. However, nothing epitomizes this better than the quirk system. Over time, your car will develop "quirks", which are issues that affect its operation and performance. Quirks can be all sorts of things, like maybe your back door opens on its own when you brake, or maybe your gauges act up every time you turn on the wipers. They're mostly not that big a problem on their own, but they can pile up as a bunch of niggling annoyances. And to heal them, you have to play a guessing game where you try to diagnose the exact nature of each quirk by narrowing down what exactly causes it. Also, the game is dark. And I don't mean dark in tone and atmosphere, though there is some of that too. I mean it's literally dark. About 70% of the time, it's nighttime. Which means you're constantly fumbling around for lights, which gets tedious. Hard to appreciate the setting when I can't see more than 20 feet in front of me. Also hard to appreciate my car cosmetics when all I can see of my car are its lights. Fortunately, most of my issues with the game can be either eliminated or alleviated by its heavily customizable difficulty. You can make quirks simpler to resolve, or even turn them off entirely, for example. After putting a couple hours in with the game, I recommend taking a look at the settings and tweaking them to suit your preferences going forward. Most of them can be changed mid-playthrough. All in all, Pacific Drive is an interesting game that has some moderate shortcomings in its gameplay design, in my opinion. But these can be at least partially addressed by the player due to its extensive difficulty settings, so it's still worth a look if you're interested.

Its quite a good game, enjoyed the challenge