Weird Car SCP exploration/survival game with some roguelite elements included, what a way to pitch a game hey?
You’re delivering something to somewhere near the Olympic Exclusion Zone, when suddenly you find yourself being transported inside the giant walls, entirely against your will or better judgement, and inside what else do you find but a car. Syphon some fuel from nearby, patch up what you can, and book it to safety while trying to avoid dangerous areas of radiation, floating chunks of the road which are adorably referred to as “pot holes”, and the occasional pillar emerging out of the ground to try and crash you. Oh and you also have Tweedle Dumb and Tweedle Crazy talkin in your ears through the radio oops. At least once you reach the garage, the local Bitchy Old Scientist Lady tells you that you’re safe and can use her garage to fix up the hunk of metal you’ve found yourself in. But of course, you’re stuck here now, and you’d quite like to get out, and one of the members of the local peanut gallery is telling you something about your car potentially driving you crazy in the future? I wonder what that’s about (no really, I’ve not played that far to find out what that’s about yet.)
Anyway that aside, I should talk about gameplay. The game works in a fairly simple roguelite cycle. You prepare for a run, then perform the run, and either fail and lose your loot, or make it back safely, and can then use the loot to improve your car for your next run. As you play through more of the game, the quality and quantity of materials you’ll find and collect on each run will increase, as will the quality of your tools, and the facilities available to you in the garage. Most resources can be scavenged, looted, plundered, and plucked from the various broken down vehicles and abandoned buildings you’ll find around the junctions you visit, and can be used to craft car parts, tools, repair kits, or just brought back with you to the garage where you can do some more serious work. The most important being scrap which not only is a core material for early game car parts or refining into later game materials, but also acts as a currency within the zone, assuming you can find somewhere to spend it. There is one other important resource that is crucial to a run though, and that is Anchor Energy, measured in kLIM. Each area will have a number of anchors available, and your primary goal in a run is to find these anchors and pluck them to feed to the Arc Device in your passenger seat, which pulls double duty as your map and your escape pod. Once you have enough energy, you have to find an exit gateway and activate it to end your run successfully.
And thats where this game’s main challenge is also introduced. The Olympic Exclusion Zone is an Exclusion Zone for a reason, this place is incredibly dangerous, especially as you go deeper. It’s full of weird alien entities, localized regions of Bad Times™, the occasional tornado, and most importantly, the Storm, which destabilises the area even more, deals a ton of damage to you and your car, and is generally not a good place to find yourself. Unless your junction has the “Perpetual Stability” modifier, which is only guaranteed to appear in story-critical areas, and a rare effect otherwise, everything you do in a junction is on a time limit. Eventually the storm does come, how long you have and how fast it approaches depends on the junction, but when it comes, it’s best to finish up whatever you’re doing and look to leave. Opening a gateway forces the storm to come immediately if it’s not already engulfed you, and since you must be a certain distance away from a gateway to activate it, it makes for some very butt clenching moments of escape.
One part of the game I find really interesting is the Quirk system, which is a part of the car maintenance system that really pulls you into the mindset of an actual mechanic, trying stuff to see if you can isolate what the issues with the car are and if you can fix them. Early on you unlock the Tinkering station, which lets you diagnose and fix quirks. Diagnoses involves filling in a statement in the form of “When the ___ does ___, it makes the ___ do ___”. There are 8 chances per return to the garage to guess what a quirk is, and once diagnosed, the fix is usually just a few resources and some wibbery colours on the screen. My first quirk was “When the car drives uphill, the back left door opens”, which was exceptionally annoying when I encountered it super early on in a run and didn’t quite understand what’s going on. Quirks range from dangerous (When the lights turn on, the car brakes), to annoying (When the car reverses, the radio toggles), to mundane (When fuel is low, the speedometer fails), to even beneficial (When the car honks, it jolts forward). It’s entirely random what you get, and is fun to try and resolve.
The game does have several difficulty settings and assist options, ranging from sliders on your resource gain/use, disabling anomaly pull/grab effects, allowing headlights even without battery, brighter highlights on interactables, or tap ignition/shifter instead of hold, though if you go into the game’s challenge mode (called expeditions), then a lot of the assist options are disabled, forcing you into the developer intended playstyle.
Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1458140 £24.99
Humble Bundle: https://www.humblebundle.com/store/pacific-drive £24.99
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