Pacific Drive is a gorgeous game. It portrays the distinctive Pacific Northwest environment in which the game takes place in beautiful detail, playing on its natural elements to great effect. Considering so much of Pacific Drive’s tension is created in its atmosphere,turning your surroundings in on itself and leaning into the surrealis very important.
The PNW is huge and unknowable, and it shows. Venture out of your car and into the woods, and you’ll find the brush is thick and dark. Trees tower over you, fog rolls in easily, and rain pours hard out of dense clouds in the sky. It’s reminiscent ofAlan Wake 2, which is also set in the same region and leans into the same traits of the setting to create its own horror.
This thoughtful design extends to the game’s menus, at least aesthetically. Opening the game for the first time made me gasp in delight at the vintage paper-textured title screen, and then again when I opened up the screen where I could load my saves. Both are styled like a vintage pamphlet or a newspaper, immediately reminding me of another surreal piece of media set in the same region: Twin Peaks.
The in-game menu, too, is aesthetically appealing and in tune with the game’s 1998 setting. All the text is in a pixel font reminiscent of the time, and most menu pages have some form of ASCII art or the kind of decorative margin you’d find in early pages on the internet. All of these factors in combination effectively create a snapshot of the time and place you’re in.
That’s a good thing, because you’ll be spending a lot of time navigating those menus. Despite being cool-looking and feeding into the atmosphere, these menus are very cluttered and overwhelming. You’ll use it to manage your inventory, fitting things into your pack as best as you can by rearranging everything you pick up within a set grid. You’ll be crafting in it, which will be very confusing at first – there are 13 different tabs within the crafting menu alone, all with unique icons. You will have a hard time figuring out which tiny icon represents which group of items, at first.
It also contains all your missions, which it breaks down into a litany of smaller steps. It has your route map, in which the map itself is clear enough, but each route is accompanied by an avalanche of icons that you will have to parse with a legend that you can toggle on and off. Most egregiously, it has a logbook full of entries and instructions – this section has 12 tabs, each with a minimum of 32 entries! There is so much information that trying to read it all made me feel a little ill.
At least some of this is intentional. Pacific Drive is a survival game, and a crucial part of that gameplay loop is getting used to the world around you, knowing what resources you need to craft crucial items and where to find them, and knowing how and when to use the tools at your disposal. The frustration comes because that knowledge won’t be at the tip of your fingers from the start. You have to learn the ropes. It is not easy breezy, but the world is compelling enough to keep you trying to figure things out.
I know the game is like this for a reason. That is not going to stop me from being angry about it. Unfortunately, in a game like this, a frustrating menu that looks great is still a net negative. I can’t help but think back to last year, when players complained about being stuck inStarfield’smenus because there were so many of them. That’s not a good thing.
