This past week, I have had a lot of work obligations that I needed to make time for.
All I’ve wanted to do is play more Pacific Drive.
Pacific Drive is a survival crafting game where you drive through a paranormal nuclear exclusion zone full of unexplained anomalies, strange glitches, and glowing orbs barely holding reality together as the world’s topology morphs, shapes, and grows ever less predictable.
I’m not usually a fan of games where the core gameplay loop is venturing out into a world for little more reason than to collect resources, upgrade assets, and venture back out for more resource gathering, but Pacific Drive’s specific mix of charmingly written characters, fiddly but rewarding car management mechanics, and the ways that the game encourages building a bond with a car that’s slowly personalised, falling apart, and your only hope of survival makes the loop into something that I am truly loving playing through.
However, Pacific Drive is also initially a somewhat inaccessible game, with mechanics at times deliberately left ambiguous and open to player discovery and micromanagement. You have to manage your battery meter and fuel, remember to manually handle the parking brake, diagnose unclear glitches in car behaviour, debate if your wheels will get you up a hill in the rain, keep an eye on your storage space, and remember to bring enough tools out to complete each drive further into the world’s expanse.
Your car is fragile, weak, and vulnerable, and every function needs manual management. Your pockets are full, and there’s so much to grab, and so little time, and so many essentials, and so much pressure to get moving, and so much mystery, and it’s fundamentally just you and the car trying not to fall apart together.
Pacific Drive is, at times, a somewhat unforgiving game. It’s constantly wearing the player and their car down with an ever growing list of hazards, escape runs which risk permanent vehicle damage, and the potential for one bad dash toward a portal costing you considerable amounts of progress. That’s all deliberate and effective, but it doesn’t inherently make for an accessible experience.
That’s why I was so pleased to see that Pacific Drive has a pretty robust set of accessibility settings and gameplay tweaking modifiers available. For a game that is fundamentally a little inaccessible, I do appreciate that there are as many settings available as there are to tweak the experience, even if I disagree with some of the choices around how those settings are presented.
Firstly, there is an accessibility menu, and I like that it’s the first menu you see when opening settings. I don’t necessarily think that everything I would consider accessibility focused is located in that one accessibility menu, some of it is exclusively inside other menus instead, but what is there is a really good starting point.
As a player who suffers from chronic motion sickness in first person games, I appreciated that Pacific Drive has a full motion sensitivity menu section, allowing tweaking of camera head bob, tool bob, reducing flickering visuals, the option to close the character’s eyes if the car tumbles and ends up rolling over, options for fading the transition in and out of the car, vignettes to darken the screen edge during fast movement, recentring options for the camera while driving, and options for automating camera direction to align with car movement.
While these together didn’t 100% eliminate all motion sickness issues for me, they were useful in drastically reducing the speed and intensity of motion sickness onset. They are helped by a few other settings, oddly not found in this motion sensitivity section of the menu, which I’ll mention shortly. I have been able to regularly play the game in multiple hour long sessions without issue, only really experiencing motion sickness if particularly tired, which for me is a big deal, it means this game has done a pretty good job of mitigating things.
The accessibility menu also contains filters for the three most common types of colour blindness, and options for highlighting items and loot in easy to spot bright highlights. The latter is particularly useful for me as someone who struggles with focus and attention, ensuring that I don’t rush and accidentally miss vital resources spawning in the dark when I’m panicked and in a rush.
In terms of the game’s weather systems, which all in various ways impact visibility, the game allows making nights less overall dark, reducing fog intensity, reducing rain effects, and disabling lightning flashes.
Lastly, while many aspects of the car’s health are meant to be monitored using meters visible within the car itself on its dashboard, you can switch on low health, low fuel, and low battery warnings, if again like me you have ADHD and struggle to remember to keep an eye out on a bunch of different meters sometimes, or if you struggle to see the smaller icons on the dashboard.
Outside of the accessibility menu, players can also tweak motion blur levels and player Field Of View, both when walking or in the car independantly. As previously mentioned I struggle with motion sickness, and these Field Of View options in particular I found really helpful in mitigating illness while playing.
In terms of difficulty, players can set the game to pause while menus are open to avoid taking damage while sorting items, turn off the penalty where collected items are lost upon a failed run, and nights can be made shorter to limit the amount of time spent with lessened visibility.
In addition car damage, player damage, and ambient damage from radiation can be turned off, as can player death. However, the reason I’m discussing these settings separately from the others is that each of them comes with a warning, stating that achievements cannot be unlocked on a save file which has activated these options. The game is very unclear about whether or not turning these options on briefly, then back off again, restores your ability to gain achievements once they’re turned back off.
While I understand the intention, these kinds of warnings act as a deterrent from using these settings, which is a real shame, as on occasion I found myself having misunderstood a gameplay mechanic and faced with the choice of losing a considerable amount of progress in a way that was going to feel unsatisfying, or losing access to achievements because I wanted to put these settings on for just a second to get my bearings. I’m not a huge fan of this kind of settings option discouragement, particularly if the consequences for turning on the setting are not clearly defined to the player.
Then there’s the realism settings, which tend to be sort of just nice conveniences in my opinion. Players can more easily swap held vehicle parts onto their car, start the ignition more quickly, tap rather than hold to shift gears, alter player protection levels inside of their car, alter wet weather traction, and set headlights to permanently function even if your car’s battery dies.
Lastly there are modifiers, which range from conveniences to difficulty tweaks, and help customise the experience of playing Pacific Drive, simplifying amounts of necessary micromanagement.
Player health, car battery, and fuel can be set to automatically replenish after a successful run rather than needing manual restoration. Additionally, your car can be set to be repaired if a run is successful, fuel can be set to be infinite, car quirks can be set to occur consistently to make diagnosing them easier, limits on guesses when diagnosing car quirks can be removed, instability storms which manifest after a lengthy stay in one place can be disabled, as can storms summoned by opening gateways.
Quickly touring the remaining settings, button holds can be set to toggles, controls can be remapped in game, audio can be customised via sliders, and the radio filter placed over music and dialogue can be removed. Subtitles are an available as an option, but unfortunately cannot be customised at all from their defaults.
Pacific Drive is, on the surface, a pretty unapproachable game initially. The vanilla experience requires a high degree of micromanaging lots of poorly explained systems in a game that pushes you to protect an eternally fragile vehicle, but the options available to tweak the challenge are granular enough to do a great job allowing for a truly custom experience. There’s a huge amount of space granted to get rid of the elements of the game that you find overwhelming, or unrewarding, or inaccessible, or simply too much to handle in combination.
The point of Pacific Drive is to be a game in which your vehicle’s destruction is a present threat. The work you’ve put into building up its functions and aesthetics might all fall away if things go south, and that risk is something easy to care about. But, the bar for a game that’s able to be completed and feel fun, while still being a little stressful and overwhelming, will differ from person to person, and generally I really like this game’s approach to customising that experience.
I’ve said before I’m not a huge fan of games putting up warnings to discourage or disincentive using some of their settings, particularly in single player games, particularly when those warnings are not clear about what they’re going to lead to or not lead to and what the long term consequences are. But, that being my biggest complaint about this deliberately designed to be quite tricky game I think says a lot.
Pacific Drive isn’t going to be a good fit for everyone. Even with these options in place players may still find vision obfuscation a barrier to play, or may find the mechanics present a little overwhelming, but I am genuinely loving this game, and really pleased it has as many options as it does for me to be able to find my bar for enjoyable challenge, as chunks of the ground are raising up in front of my speeding car, with very little notice to react.