Video Game / Pacific Drive

Drive to Survive

A New Weird Roguelike Survival Driving Game published by Ironwood Studios, Pacific Drive takes place in an Alternate History where, in 1947, the Olympic Peninsula, Washington State, became the testing ground for a revolutionary new technology that promised to radically change the world. However, certain complications related to the effects of these experiments on the surrounding area led the U.S. Government to establish the Olympic Exclusion Zone, which gradually grew and grew until the Zone was abandoned and sealed off in 1985, with all information pertaining to the Zone and its origins remaining a mystery.

You are "The Driver", assigned with the thankless task of making a mysterious delivery to an address in the vicinity of the Olympic Exclusion Zone. Inevitably, you end up sucked inside this anomalous enclave — and soon find a mysterious artifact known as a "Remnant", taking the form of a beaten-up station wagon.

Now, with the guidance of several eccentric researchers over the radio, you must scavenge resources, dodge anomalies, upgrade your ride, and discover how reality came apart in this remote corner of the Pacific Northwest — you might even discover a way to escape the Peninsula with your sanity intact.

The game was released on February 22, 2024 on Playstation 5, Steam, and the Epic Games Store, with a demo releasing early for Steam NextFest earlier in the same month.

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Pacific Drive provides examples of:

• The '90s: The game begins in 1998, two decades after the Olympic Exclusion Zone was completely cut off from the outside world.
• Ace Custom: What you eventually will transform your car into.
• Achievement Mockery: The achievement "Driver's Ed Dropout" is granted after hitting the gas before putting the car in Drive 20 times, "Et tu?" can be obtained by getting injured by your car — for instance, if you forget to put it in Park and it rolls into you — and finally, "Nothing Personnel, Zone" is awarded for kicking a Tourist.
• Acid Attack: The Mid Zone is chock full of anomalies that cause acid damage, from Belching Barnacles that send acid in all directions, to Sick Mickeys that send acid at you, to Corrosive Storms that slowly melt you when you're unprotected, and more.
• The Alleged Car: What your station wagon starts out as. It's only barely distinguishable from the various other wrecks you'll find along the roads, and really only in that it runs at all. As mentioned by Tobias early on, cars haven't been running in the Zone in at least 20 years.
• Alternate History: Aside from the obvious changes to the Olympic Peninsula, in 1955 the US president was named "Lawrence Koch" instead of Harry S. Truman.
• Anachronistic Soundtrack: The in-game radio is full of songs by real life performers that didn't start recording until the 2020s. Possibly justified, as some notes indicate that the Zone has some Timey-Wimey Ball effects here and there.
• Anachronism Stew: The different areas of the Zone were walled off and abandoned at different times going as far back as the 50s, but all the buildings, car wrecks, and technology shown are stuck in the same vaguely-1970s aesthetic, with scattered bits of 50s technology, mostly in the form of things you build in your garage. Justified by the fact that the Zone is stated to destroy, absorb and essentially remix the things that people brought into it, meaning that the 70's-looking wrecked car you're scavenging in the Deep Zone isn't an actual 1970s car that was abandoned in the 50s but rather the Zone's rebuilt interpretation of what a car looks like.
• Anomalous Art: The murals found in the Mid-Zone were painted using a Remnant paint can. Visiting them reveals that they've actually subtly changed from when Francis and Tobias had visited them in previous decades and the new designs contain GPS Evidence of the location of the remnant counter-signal in the Inner Zone.
• Anti-Frustration Features:
  • Oppy's garage has the Friendly Dumpster, which can be activated to spit out random crafting materials or even full car parts for when you might not have enough gathered from a run to repair your car. It can also appear randomly in a zone, most frequently beside Gas Stations.
  • The Tourists can also toss random items to you when you're not looking.
  • If you manage to get stuck or flip your car, you can engage a Car Warp, which causes the car to disappear and re-materialize several feet away. The only snag is that this uses up a considerable chunk of battery, and can cause damage if there is insufficient charge.
  • While in the Auto Shop, you can make use of any stored crafting materials, regardless of whether or not they are in your inventory.
  • The options menu offers numerous ways to tone down the difficulty of the game, whether it's repairing your car instantly and for free on returning to the garage, or disabling some of the more demanding mechanics like Instability storms when gateways are opened.
  • Even if a tire is blown out, you can still drive the car (albeit really poorly). The engine never completely breaks down either, but it can wear out over time.
  • By the same token, worn out parts can always be fixed: the worn part just means they're more susceptible to damage. The exception is batteries: if they get the "swollen" tag, they can't be fixed and they leak power constantly until replaced.
• Arbitrary Skepticism: Sure, the Zone has flying traffic lights, exploding mannequins that appear out of nowhere, semi-sentient bouncing piles of scrap, and acid belching barnacles, but asking Oppy to believe in Bigfoot is too much.
• Artifact of Doom: Remnants like your car have supernatural powers, but cause their users to become incredibly obsessed with them and eventually drive them insane until they run off alone into the Zone.
• Artistic License – Cars: The car has an automatic transmission, but only has two settings: "Park" and "Drive". In reality even an automatic selector would have Reverse, Neutral, and likely one or two numbered towing gears. None of these would really be necessary for a game that uses arcade controls however so they are absent on the car (the fact that the two settings spell out 'PD' for 'Pacific Drive' on the gear stick also helps).
  • As mentioned under Gasoline Lasts Forever, the fuel available after the zone has been abandoned for decades probably shouldn't be usable.
  • Similarly, the player can drain fuel from large six-wheeled trucks (that would almost certainly run on diesel in real life) to fuel their gas-powered car.
• Ascended to a Higher Plane of Existence: Despite apparently dying, Tobias is able to communicate with Francis and Oppy when the The Driver reaches the television corridors.
• As the Good Book Says...: One of the random radio transmissions you can pick up is a woman quoting and discussing Psalm 23.
• Awesome, but Impractical: Higher tier parts for the car all have drawbacks.
  • Power Tires have the ability to draw power, increasing their grip rating to AA in all three categories. However, the power draw is extreme (approximately 1 unit of battery power every half second for a car with four Power Tires), and it's not a toggle, it's a "press-and-hold" ability. When they're not powered, Power Tires are barely better than Summer Tires, being only slightly better in water.
  • The Powered Bumper is incredibly resistant to damage, taking a full force slam into a wall or a huge dose of acid without even blinking, but it drains power constantly.
  • The LIM-Chipped Engine is an absolute beast, allowing you to get up to speed of 100 miles an hour without trouble, but it absolutely devastates your fuel tank, getting only 7 miles to the gallon (the Turbolight Engine gets 13), forcing you to bring along more fuel cans or be constantly on the look out for refueling opportunities.
  • The AMP Engine completely removes your dependence on fuel by being a battery-powered engine, and more powerful than the Turbolight Engine to boot. However, your battery also powers things like your headlights and your special abilities, and while you can siphon fuel from almost any wreck you come across, opportunities to charge the battery without a Battery Charger or Plasma Charger item are very rare, meaning you'll constantly be worried about running out of power.
  • Olympium Body Parts are extremely hardy and resistant to damage, especially the damage of the Deep Zone, but Olympium Ore is rare, and the parts require a lot of it. Fully outfitting your car in Olympium Panels and Doors requires 120 Olympium lumps, when a decent run might get you 20-30. The panels and doors are also not resistant to the normal wear-and-tear that wears down car parts, meaning that running too often with them will make them worn or fragile.
• Bigfoot, Sasquatch, and Yeti: A Running Gag is Tobias' insistence that he's seen Bigfoot, much to Oppy's annoyance.
• Body Horror: Scanning the Inverted Door mural leads to Tobias and Francis warning The Driver not to go through any freestanding doors they might find in the Zones. Passing through the doorway will literally turn the victim inside out. Most of the victims were wildlife, but poor Tobias once witnessed an entire hiking party emerge...
  • Averted with the Tourists, Tour Buses and Tourist Traps: what looks like a person or horrifying amalgamation of people is in fact just a bunch of mannequins. Unfortunately, they may be sentient.
• Boring Yet Practical:
  • Offroad Tires are boring and not great on roads, with only a B rating for paved surfaces. But considering how often you go off road and the AA rating that the tires have for that, as well as the A rating in water, Offroad Tires are the most capable tires you're going to use for most of the game.
  • Armored Panels and Doors. Making them requires the relatively rare Thermosap Crystals, which are only available in the Mid Zone, but they're common on the Abandoned Squire wrecks all over the various junctions. Pulling those parts off intact with the appropriate tool means you'll have end-game level durability before you even go into the Mid Zone if you're lucky. The only drawback is that Armored gear gets wrecked by acid, which is distressingly common in the Mid Zone.
  • The LIMpulse Bumper and later the LIM Shield. For a pittance of battery power, you can prevent anything from latching on to your car. This is helpful when dealing with Abductors and Bubblegum Buddies, and could be a matter of life-and-death when dealing with some of the more dangerous Bunnies. It does not, however, prevent Pickpockets from pulling parts off your car.
  • The Carbureted Engine. It's not the most powerful by a long shot, but it works, and is very fuel efficient. While going faster is very helpful, the basic engine makes sure that you can travel the entire Olympic Peninsula without stopping for gas if you have expanded tanks, and as long as you don't get stuck in an instability storm, you'll be fine. It does, however, struggle mightily to get up hills.
• But Now I Must Go: After The Driver succeeds in freeing themselves from the Remnant car, Oppy decides to finally leave the Zone, like her husband Allen urged her to do thirty-seven years ago.
• Central Theme: Obsession. Everyone in the game is obsessed with something to the point that it affects them negatively. You're obsessed with your car because it's a Remnant and driving you insane. Tobias is obsessed with cryptids and conspiracy theories. Francis is obsessed with Tobias. Oppy is obsessed with whether or not her Mass Hallucination memory of Allen was real or just something she made up. ARDA is obsessed with exploiting LIM tech to dangerous extremes. It's only by recognizing the obsession and dealing with it that anyone gets happier.
  • Tobias refuses to give up on his conspiracy theories and possibilities, going to dangerous extremes to satisfy his obsession. It costs him his life.
  • Francis loves Tobias desperately, but manages to move on without doing anything dangerous. He doesn't stop loving Tobias, but doesn't follow him into death.
  • Oppy manages to get closure by confirming that Allen really was talking to her 37 years ago, and decides that she doesn't need the Zone anymore.
  • You Can't Know Everything: So much of the Zone has been meticulously documented and catalogued, but the logbook entries you find are less "this is X creature and it does Y" and more an anecdote about what happened when the writer was observing the anomaly^note Case in point: the logbook entry for the Abductor is a letter from one person to another explaining that they will be late because they're in a tree at the moment, without mentioning the Abductor at all. At various points in the story, Oppy even chastises Tobias and Francis for thinking that she knows what's going to happen when the Driver does something: she has no idea, that's why they're running an experiment. Even at the end of the game, there's only hypotheses about what will happen when you drive the Remnant into the Well, and the truth of what happens is unexplained.
    • Conversely, the idea that you can't know everything is juxtaposed with the idea of learn what is important. As a direct example, you may not know what an anomaly is, but the Logbook entries will tell you what they do (though not always directly) so that you can deal with them or avoid them. This even factors into the storyline, as each major character learns what drives them and why it is important to them, and when they're going too far.
• Checkpoint Starvation: The game only saves between junctions (or manually at the garage). Be prepared for whatever the zone can throw at you because you can only go back as far as the start of the current level.
• Clingy Macguffin: Mixed with a bit of Artifact of Attraction. Remnants are known to make their users obsessed with them, but by the same token they can't be separated easily, even by force. The car is the only thing keeping you alive, so naturally you the player will be attracted to it, but it also won't let you die.
• Continuing is Painful: If you die, you lose all resources collected during the drive^note You can change this in the options to losing half, or losing nothing, (often) leaving you with a battered car and nothing to show for it. If you're particularly unlucky, you won't have enough materials saved up for a full repair afterwards, and have to set off for your next run with sub-par or even missing parts.
• Cool Car: Averted at first. You drive around in a beat up 70's era faux wood paneled station wagon, but over the course of the game you can gradually upgrade it into a genuine cool car.
• Cool and Unusual Punishment: When Oppy initially balks at helping The Driver, Tobias threatens to start reading the ten years worth of poetry he's been composing. She immediately complies.
• Crippling Overspecialization: The Paddle Tires are the absolute best for moving through water, with an AA rating. However, they only have a B rating for offroad, and a horrifying C rating for pavement. The only junction with water is the Mires, and the water is entirely avoidable. Unless you bring them along and swap them out when needed, Paddle Tires can be completely ignored.
• Deadpan Snarker: Oppy is a more bitter example of this trope than usual. She's an ill-tempered woman who initially resents having to deal with you at all, and she rarely has anything pleasant to say to you, Tobias, or Francis.
• Death from Above: The various storms, which are large, fast moving areas that crawl across zones every so often.
  • The Windstorm is the least dangerous and it still has the power to flip your car over if you're not careful.
  • The Seismic Storm causes Bollards and Geysers to pop up with incredible frequency, sending you and your car flying, and making driving a terrible guessing game looking for the "safe" path.
  • The Electromagnetic Storm will play hell with your car, turning your headlights, wipers and dome light on and off randomly, blocking radio transmissions and changing the volume and channel whenever it wants, and most distressingly, blocking your map access.
  • The Corrosive Storm literally rains down globs of acid in the area (in the form of Rotten Eggs), and will result in a constant loss of health if you get out of your car.
  • The Meteor Storm is the most terrifying: massive pillars of white stone covered in Hot Dust will slam down randomly in the area. While the chances of being hit personally are low, you will die if you get hit. If your car gets hit, it will be devastated (even Olympium Panels will be horrifically damaged), and even if you don't get hit, the radiation is significant enough to damage your car.
• Defrosting Ice Queen: In the beginning, Oppy is abrasive to you, but becomes steadily less so as the game progresses, and will sometimes even compliment you after a particularly successful run. After Tobias' death, she is outright empathetic with Francis, marking the point where she fully defrosts.
• Diegetic Interface: Threefold example.
  • Early on, you obtain the Mechanic's Eye, a helmet-mounted AR device which provides a HUD interface for things such as your health bar, or your distance away from your truckster, or your inventory.
  • Speaking of the car, in addition to a compass and the expected fuel gauge and speed-o-meter, your wagon gets equipped with the ARC Device, which comes resplendent with an electronic map and an ability-mapper that can both be interacted with from the driver's seat, and a series of systems monitors that will help you keep track of the condition of your car and its various parts, as well as a Geiger counter.
  • Lastly, the auto-shop's Route Planner also sports this kind of interface, being an actual map plastered to the wall in front of a projecter linked to an advanced navigational system.
• Due to the Dead: For the final mission, you're given the optional objective of putting a bobblehead depicting Tobias' favorite cryptid onto the dashboard of your car, as a tribute to them. The game marks your choice with an achievement and a comment from Tobias himself before you leave the Well.
• Eldritch Location: The Olympic Exclusion Zone, a shifting landscape filled with strange and deadly phenomena.
• Everything Trying to Kill You: Averted in the early part of the game. On the outskirts of the Zone, the Anomalies are more a hindrance than outright direct harm, but the deeper you go, the more frequent the Anomalies become deadly or even outright malicious. Left-Right and the Bubblegum Buddies mess with your work, for example, whereas Sick Mickeys, Devil Grinders, Rotten Eggs, the Hot Dust and the almost purposefully violent Blacksmith are very, very direct threats to your physical health.
• Fast-Killing Radiation: Zigzagged. On the one hand, radiation is an ever-present hazard in the Zone: some locations are saturated with it, slowly killing you when the background radiation is at 2.5K, and getting worse when you're in the area of effect of Hot Dust, which bumps the radiation to 5.0K. And when a zone collapses entirely, you'll be inundated with radiation at 10.0K, which will kill you very quickly if you don't leave soon. On the other hand, once you're outside the effect of the radiation, there's no lingering effects; no one suffers from radiation poisoning, and the damage from radiation is quickly healed with medical kits or food. Some background information available through logs and the F.A.X. indicates that no one is sure why that's the case, but they're not complaining too much about it. The game itself implies that the radiation isn't strictly nuclear radiation, but rather instability radiation, which may explain the difference.
• Featureless Protagonist: At no point can the Driver be seen or heard in any way — whenever you're holding a tool, only the device can be seen, and never the Driver's hands. Neither does the Driver appear in any of the mirrors, be they on their car or in any of the dozens of bathrooms they come across.
• First-Person Ghost: The ultimate extent of you being a Featureless Protagonist: all tools just float out in the air when used, you never have visible hands on the steering wheel of your car, etc.
• Forbidden Zone: The Olympic Exclusion Zone, naturally. If the "no trespassing" signs don't put you off, then the 300-meter high wall will.
• Foreshadowing: When you drive the Remnant into Cappy in Sierram, Oppy is almost frantic when she struggles to regain contact with you back at the garage, though she quickly reverts back to her usual frosty self. Tobias and Francis soon point out that the event triggered a Mass Hallucination, but Oppy says she saw nothing due to her systems being out. Later revelations make it clear she saw Allen again after 37 years, driving her to push you deeper into the Zone.
• For Science!: The only reason Oppy is helping you is 1) to get you out of her garage, and 2) because she can use you to explore dangerous areas in the Zone.
  • ARDA also created the Olympic Exclusion Zone because of their For Science! desires. They were actually looking for the next big thing to fight the Soviets, and forced all the scientists to push the limits of LIM tech to dangerous extremes.
• Functional Addict: Implied with Oppy, who Tobias describes as being able to compute complex mathematics with one hand, "...with a double in the other." Though Tobias and Francis note Oppy's intellect is in steep decline from what it once was. She also appears to use "expired medication", but it's not expanded what for.
• Gainax Ending: To an extent. You drive the Remnant into the Well, prompting a gamma burst, but Ophelia and Francis manage to contain it. This results in you being thrown into a weird world of corridors lined by televisions showing a test pattern that makes it look like they're staring at you. As you proceed down the corridors, you hear echoes of the past between Ophelia, Allen, Tobias and Francis, before Tobias starts talking to you directly despite being "dead". The pocket dimension you're in starts to become unstable and you're forced back into your car to drive back to the pillar of light and get back to the garage as Oppy and Francis try to maintain the dimension until you can escape. Once back at the station, Oppy is satisfied, the Remnant is unlinked from you (but the car is still there) and Francis encourages you to keep searching the Zone. Roll credits. One of the themes of the game is that you're not going to understand everything, so this ending fits perfectly: you didn't explain everything about the zone, but that wasn't the point.
• Gasoline Lasts Forever: In real life, gasoline begins to degrade after six months. Draining it from cars that have been rotting for twenty years or gas stations that have been abandoned for forty would be futile. Slightly justified in that the Exclusion Zone is a constantly-regenerating World of Chaos, your own car is a reality-bending artifact, and on both counts normal physics don't necessarily apply.
• Gameplay and Story Segregation: Oppy will comment that your Remnant car has the ability to save you from death and bring you back to the Auto Shop, even if you've never died.
  • After finishing the main story, Oppy will still comment when you return to the garage, despite the fact that she's left the Zone and signed off entirely. Conversely, Francis will never say anything when you return.
• Gone Horribly Right: The Deep Zone contains an abnormality called "the Well", which produces enormous amounts of gamma radiation - a seemingly infinite source of energy. Oppy later reveals that at least some Remnants were created, since Remnants act as keys that cause the Well to erupt. One particular experiment to activate the Well resulted in a gamma ray burst that killed Oppy's husband, caused the Mass Hallucination, and created Remnants from compatible objects all across the Zone - including the car you're driving.
• Government Agency of Fiction: ARDA, which was devoted to examining and exploiting the possibilities of LIM technology.
• Greater-Scope Villain: insofar as the game has a villain, it's clearly ARDA. When it became clear that Ophelia Turner was more interested in safe applications of LIM tech rather than pushing the envelope, she was shuffled aside. ARDA all but forced the experiment that devastated the Zone back in the 60's, and spent significant resources trying to harness the anomalies rather than deal with the threat that they represented. When they couldn't control things any more, or justify continued funding for LIM tech, they didn't even try to clean up the Olympic Peninsula, instead just walling it off and walking away.
• Guide Dang It!: While the game is excellent at giving you tips on how to play, you are expected to experiment and find things out for yourself. Some things, however, are all but impossible to figure out without specific instructions.
  • One important piece of information is only mentioned in a random loading screen tooltip, namely that car parts provide their resistances to all parts around them. Mix-and-match parts are better at providing different protections, and using the same parts makes the protection even better, as a result of overlapping protections.
  • There's one anomaly in the Outer Zone that is nearly impossible to find without a Resource Radar: the Honeypot. It looks like just another wrecked vehicle, and the only thing that differentiates it is that it has all of its panels and doors in excellent shape, and a full gas tank. When you approach it, several lit road flares appear out of nowhere to attract Abductors. Finding this without the Resource Radar is possible, but it looks so similar to everything else in the Zone that it's incredibly unlikely.
• Handwave: The Driver never talks because the car's radio didn't come with a transmitter to talk back, and they never find a blueprint to build one (or perhaps they simply never bother).
• Helpful Mook:
  • Tourists may rarely throw you items, and Abductors can pluck Bunny-type anomalies off of your car or even pull it out of a tight spot.
  • Bunnies can accidently destroy Tourists, taking themselves out as well.
  • Bubblegum Buddies can distract Abductors for you.
  • The "Hopped-Up Hare" Bunny anomaly actually charges up your battery when it attaches to your car, while the Happy Hare repairs your car.
  • Their immobile counterparts, the Pacemaker and Beating Heart (an Anomaly shaped like a bush, adorned in the same speakers as your Auto Shop's Matter Regenerator upgrade and glowing the same green), do the same.
• Horror Hunger: Inverted: horror non-hunger. While you're not required to eat or drink, a few disturbing Fax Machine messages indicate other people in the Zone also don't, so this is more than a mere gameplay convenience.
• Hub Level: In between exploring the zones, you can repair and upgrade your wagon at Oppy's garage.
• Hyperactive Metabolism: The player can eat old canned food and MREs to restore their health as an alternative to the medkits or LIM healing devices present in the Zone. There will likely be a situation where the only thing that prevents the driver from being violently dissolved into particulate matter by a zone storm is consuming their entire their stock of Brand X spam and beans.
• Indy Escape: Grabbing a Stable Energy anchor is necessary to escape the zone and return to the garage, but a whole lot of dangerous anomalies pop out of the ground to attack you when you do. Opening the gateway back to the garage has the whole sector rapidly collapse around you as you scramble to drive to the column of light.
• Jerkass Has a Point: When Francis objects to Oppy telling the Driver to get close to the largest, most radioactive anomaly in the entire Zone, Oppy points out that she's not forcing anyone to do anything, and if the Driver doesn't want to, they won't do it it all. Of course, you have to do it to progress the story, but Oppy is entirely correct.
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: Dr. Oppy is constantly putting you down and complaining about you ruining her garage, but she does let you use all the equipment there, and her instructions do help you survive and understand what's happening in the Zone.
• Mad Artist: Tobias and Francis at one point have you track down murals left behind by a former ARDA employee. Once a normal executive's secretary who painted as a hobby, she was a victim of the mass hallucination event and afterward attempted to paint her visions. She was frustrated by her results until she discovered a Remnant paint can which resulted in the creation of a series of murals across the zone that slowly change their designs, which end up being analyzed by the player in the current day to collect GPS Evidence of the remnant counter-signal's location.
• Made of Explodium: Tourists will explode if you nudge them with anything (your car, your foot, a hurled road flare, and Bunny in the midst of its usual shtick, etc). Ticking Tumblers will explode whenever they feel like it. Tour Busses and Tourist Traps go off with any contact. Boom Bunnies explode after hopping at you or your car. The Deep Zone is basically full of things that explode, to the point that database entries for anomalies in the Deep Zone start to complain about "all the EXPLOSIONS!"
• Meaningful Name: Oppy's actual name is Ophelia, but Oppy is also short for Oppenheimer, who (like Oppy) created technology capable of wrecking the world.
• Murderous Mannequin: Downplayed regarding the Tourists. They have the "creepy mannequin" part down, resembling eldritch crash-test dummies, and the "murderous" element is satisfied by the fact that they blow up when driven or walked into. The downplaying comes from how they are completely motionless once they spawn in (well, almost) and occasionally toss you items.
• No Antagonist: There is nothing intentionally malevolent about the Zone, and all of the human characters you actually interact with are friendly and don't mean anyone harm, just grumpy loners at worst. The closest the story has to a Big Bad is ARDA, and they left a long while ago.
• No-Sell: Some parts are capable of blocking certain Statuses. For example, Insulated parts block the Charged effect, while Puncture-Proof Tires, obviously, cannot suffer a Flat or a Blow-Out due to their airless design.
• Noodle Incident: Tobias promises Oppy the current situation isn't like "The Sasquatch Incident." What happened is left unmentioned, but it apparently led to them not speaking to each other for ten years.
• Non-Malicious Monster: Some of the anomalies appear to be actual organisms (biological or otherwise), but none are hostile in the traditional sense. Tourists simply stand around and explode if you crash into them, and Abductors curiously drag your car (or you, or whatever it is you're holding) along if you are caught without intentionally hurting you, for instance. The Bunnies, in turn, seem to seek out your car, but if you repel them with an upgrade (or even just bat them off with your prybar), they'll slink away almost as if they were just playing and didn't mean to provoke you.
• Offscreen Teleportation: The Tourists can multiply and/or change position if you turn your camera away from them. The "Something's Moving..." modifier forces this to happen whenever possible.
• Pillar of Light: The exit gateways take the form of an enormous column of golden light — this proves a rather helpful navigational aid, given that the conditions at the time of opening are often less than ideal.
• The Remnant: Less militaristic than most examples, and not related to the Remnant-type Anomalies like your car. Oppy, Tobias, and Francis are part of a cadre of scientists and administrators who actively avoided ARDA's evacuation demands to continue their research.
• Resources Management Gameplay: Par for the course in a Survival Sandbox game. Your main priorities will be keeping your fuel topped-up and your battery charged, with a variety of tools and upgrades available to help you do so. It's also essential to scavenge resources from the Zone in order to construct new parts and tools, or maintain your existing ones.
• Roguelite: You select a route through the map at the start of a run, stopping at Junctions along the way before eventually collecting enough energy to open a portal back to the garage and repairing your car to start again. The junctions that you travel through are roughly similar, but the maps could be turned 90, 180 or 270 degrees, your entry point could be one of several possibilities, and anchors and resources are always placed in random locations. The goal is to get enough resources to make your run worthwhile and return without dying, and you use your resources to incrementally upgrade your gear to give you better chances in future runs. In addition, each Junction can have modifiers that can vastly change how you experience them; a Junction could be covered in Eerie Darkness, or electricity could give you an unexpected and unwelcome speed boosts with Shocking Speed. There's over 40 possible Junction modifiers.
• Scavenger World: Much of the gameplay revolves around scavenging resources from the various zones to repair and upgrade your wagon.
• Schizo Tech: You're driving a 70's station wagon equipped with a flatscreen touch-capable computer that includes vacuum tubes. Justified, as the car is a Remnant, which are always antiquated technology, while the computer is Oppy's invention that she gives you to operate her portal network.
• Screw This, I'm Outta Here: Long before the game begins, ARDA pulled this on the entire Olympic Peninsula. With LIM technology not delivering any particularly usable breakthroughs, and the side effects running rampant and killing people en masse, ARDA simply decided to pull up stakes, wall off the entire peninsula, tell everyone to stay out, and left. The fact that the wall isn't keeping anomalies from spreading is not something they seem to care about, and the department itself may or may not even exist anymore.
• Sentient Vehicle: Your car, as a Remnant, has something of a mind of its own, though the extent of its self-awareness is up for debate. The most obvious sign of this is its ability to return you to the Auto Shop upon death, but it can also develop strange "Quirks" that range from the annoying (the horn honking when you close the trunk) to the potentially disastrous (the engine cutting off when you turn on the headlights).
  • Junctions with the "Turncoat" condition will cause your car to move and act on its own whenever you're not driving it. It can even run you over and kill you when this happens!
• Shout-Out:
  • One of the first Ability-type mods you can learn to make is a set of Jump Jacks
  • Hitting 88 MPH for the first time gets you the achievement Great Scott! Similarly, being airborne long enough will earn you "Where We're Going, We Don't Need Roads".
  • The Weird Wagon decal kit is an obvious homage to the Mystery Machine.
  • Checking the F.A.X. Machine, you can receive a message stating "We're just...normal men... Just... innocent men."
  • The Shark Teeth decal features a reference to "Rabbit Season" on the rear quarter panel.
• Simple, yet Awesome: Racks. Every single rack upgrade can be constructed with Steel Sheets and Stable Energy anchors, and building them vastly increases your car's abilities. If you want more battery power, more fuel capacity, more storage space, the ability to recharge your batteries from weather conditions, a radiation shield, and more, you need racks, and getting them is very easy.
  • The Mini Turbine is possibly the best of the battery rechargers, as they can be powered by simply driving your car, which is something you'll already be doing a lot of. They even have the potential to balance out the MpKW cost of the AMP Engine to an extent.
  • The Fuel Synthesizer can be a life-saver in a pinch, being able to refill an unaltered gas tank with some fuel to spare, and its admittedly hefty power costs (about 34 KW to fill up from empty) can easily be countered with the above-mentioned Mini Turbine or its siblings, especially if you use multiple, as well as a Plasma Charger or Battery Jumper.
• Stalked by the Bell: Story-developing areas (such as the tutorial) while invariably have the "perpetual stability" condition, in which the storm waits until you activate the Arc device to open a gate back to the garage. In most other zones the storm will slowly close in, ready to scramble you into a World of Chaos.
• Survival Sandbox: The genre of this game. You can choose which junctions to visit on every run, and you'll make quite a few runs not to advance the story, but simply to gather the resources for repairs and upgrades.
• Those Two Guys: Tobias and Francis, who provide most of the radio chatter and lore when Oppy isn't speaking, and generally have a Straight Man and Wise Guy act.
• Unbroken First-Person Perspective: In conjunction with the Driver being a Featureless Protagonist, you're locked into a first-person view whether walking or driving.
• Voice with an Internet Connection: Your primary source of assistance is Oppy, a scientist living in the Olympic Exclusion Zone, who guides you over the radio with the steps you need to survive. You also have contact with Tobias and Francis, who provide color commentary.
• What a Piece of Junk: Even when the car is kitted with the best stuff you can make, it'll still look like a station wagon put together a little haphazardly. But its ragged looks won't stop it from being able to turbo-boost-jump in the air, or literally fly a short distance with antigravity.
  • Even at the very start, the car is more than meets the eye. Even ignoring that it may or may not be alive, when you find the car the engine is in completely working order, it still has one working headlight, the windows and most of the body panels are intact, and it has all four tires (if you count the one sitting right next to it). This doesn't sound like much, but considering what the Zone tends to do to cars- like the cargo van you used in the intro, which ended up scattered across a square mile radius- it's clear right away that this one is tougher than most.
• What the Hell, Hero?: Francis is not happy with Oppy risking The Driver's life by telling them to drive straight into a large anomaly called Colossal Cappy, all for the sake of determining if their car is a Remnant.
• The Workaholic: Even before her husband's death, Oppy buried herself in her work. Invoked by Oppy after Tobias' death. When she tries to keep the mission on track, Francis asks her if this is what she did after her husband passed away - and Oppy confirms this, stating that was the year she found a breakthrough in her self-repairing material project.

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