This game has some of the most human lore I've ever read, and was very pleasant for it. It made exploring for new info in the postgame worth doing.
To illustrate this, I'll use the description for the acid bubble anomalies. It's framed as a conversation about a coworker who died recklessly running into one of them, getting reduced to nothing but goop. In that conversation, they're talking about how ♥♥♥♥♥♥ up it is that they can't tell the family what happened or even why it's going to need to be a closed casket funeral.
Then it ends on them going "What? No I'm not sad the guy died, he was a jerk!"

It's such a lovely combination of apathy and callousness that feels very true to how people respond to things like this, more worried about the family of a guy than they are mourning the guy who died.

This kind of excellent empathic writing permeates the entire game, both in the main storyline and out of it. You can kinda put together the internal monologues of characters just listening to their dialogue and actions taken, and it's something that can consistently be felt even in the more superfluous documents. EG, one of the Meeting Minutes documents has the main science lady addressing a tendency of her colleagues to talk over her using hard data she recorded OF those interactions.

Mechanically, the game is rather simple. Hoard crafting ingredients, use it to upgrade and repair your dinky station wagon into a hardened battle dinky station wagon, try not to get launched into orbit by pillars of stone and explosions. The driving feels weighty and chaotic, suitable for how horrible those things tended to be to drive, and even at later upgrades you're still going to need to deal with your car skidding out sometimes. It makes offroading way more engaging than it might be otherwise since you're barely able to keep a straight line on a slight slope especially with your cracked suspension bouncing you like a basketball with every small turn you make.

Ultimately, for a genre of game I'm not usually a fan of (survival crafting is my truest enemy), Pacific Drive really impressed me! I do reccomend playing on a higher difficulty though since if you're the efficient planning sort it'll be a bit on the easy end.

This game has some of the most human lore I've ever read, and was very pleasant for it. It made exploring for new info in the postgame worth doing. To illustrate this, I'll use the description for the acid bubble anomalies. It's framed as a conversation about a coworker who died recklessly running into one of them, getting reduced to nothing but goop. In that conversation, they're talking about how fucked up it is that they can't tell the family what happened or even why it's going to need to be a closed casket funeral. Then it ends on them going "What? No I'm not sad the guy died, he was a jerk!" It's such a lovely combination of apathy and callousness that feels very true to how people respond to things like this, more worried about the family of a guy than they are mourning the guy who died. This kind of excellent empathic writing permeates the entire game, both in the main storyline and out of it. You can kinda put together the internal monologues of characters just listening to their dialogue and actions taken, and it's something that can consistently be felt even in the more superfluous documents. EG, one of the Meeting Minutes documents has the main science lady addressing a tendency of her colleagues to talk over her using hard data she recorded OF those interactions. Mechanically, the game is rather simple. Hoard crafting ingredients, use it to upgrade and repair your dinky station wagon into a hardened battle dinky station wagon, try not to get launched into orbit by pillars of stone and explosions. The driving feels weighty and chaotic, suitable for how horrible those things tended to be to drive, and even at later upgrades you're still going to need to deal with your car skidding out sometimes. It makes offroading way more engaging than it might be otherwise since you're barely able to keep a straight line on a slight slope especially with your cracked suspension bouncing you like a basketball with every small turn you make. Ultimately, for a genre of game I'm not usually a fan of (survival crafting is my truest enemy), Pacific Drive really impressed me! I do reccomend playing on a higher difficulty though since if you're the efficient planning sort it'll be a bit on the easy end.