The Pacific Drive Deep Dive
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Support the channel at https://www.patreon.com/CharlatanWonder I’m not sure if this game wasn’t scary or if I’ve just done so …
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that is a kickass chicken parm!
also, correct me if i'm wrong, but i'm pretty sure that this takes place ~ 2020 due to the music and pride flags that you have access to, while the zone is perma stuck in a 1970-to 1990s era due to the time that the evac took place
Chicken Parm is good for Managed Democracy!
Missed you!
please turn off motion blur in your game settings when you record it looks awful
please make chili sometimes I know how to make it and have a good recipe I can show you if you want
STALKER is about the horror of living in Eastern Europe, Pacific Drive is about the horror of total car dependency, one of the horrors of living in the USA.
video games
I was gonna tease you about being a busy guy bc I saw you in the wild YouTube, but it was a Napoleon Blownapart premiere, so it only made me respect you more.
Did he just say 128 gigs of RAM?
I feel like this game would be much better if the world was more like Stalker, and car customization closer to My Summer Car, without the jank.
So this is like The Long Drive, but with something actually going on?
I think people are on the wrong track comparing this game to either extraction or survival crafting games – I'd compare it to walking simulators. The important part is the story that you hear told through some amazing voice acting – everything else is just stuff to do while that's happening. And I'd include the devs in the people who maybe didn't get that's what they were doing, I only unlocked a tiny amount of stuff before the game ended and it wasn't fun to grind the massive amounts of stuff needed to get anything else unlocked. Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed it and would play more if they put out more story, but I'm not gonna play just for achievements, yuck.
Potholes don't grab your car. They're just floating rocks. The name 'pothole' wouldn't make sense if they were the ones that grabbed your car. You meant to say abductors.
OMG face reveal!!!
You can't 'strap extra fuel tanks and batteries to any part' though? You can put them in the back seat or over the windows above the back wheels. That's two places. You get 6 slots you can put them in that are in two places.
I wish they didn't force all of the woke flags into the sticker menu. It literally just clutters the sticker menu for the sake of the like three people that care about them. They could've just made them downloadable or something. To be honest I just think its kind of ridiculous to force your sexuality into everything. Normal of all orientations people don't need that shit in their games. Like, even of the people represented by the flags very few of them feel the need to go on and on about it. Putting the flags in there just panders to the very few LGBT people that make their sexuality their whole identity. The same people that look for things to be offended about as a hobby.
While I agree that there's a lot that could be added to the game and maybe it is a little bit hollow but it still rings well for me personally to the point where it inspired me to work on a diorama!
bad takes everywhere. i found your issue with podcasts and free libraries especially hilarious
The Tourists got me twitching a few times, no pun intended. But yeah, really felt like Pacific Drive could have been a bit spookier.
Still dug those desolate vibes, but was expecting more fear and dread vs… huh, that's cool/weird.
very road-like
This looks like an interesting evolution on the Jalopy formula (anyone else remember that game, about driving across Europe in an old Soviet junker car?), but going for the weird fiction approach feels like it might affect the tone compared to the more grounded feeling of being stranded in Hungary, miles away from the nearest petrol station, with an empty fuel tank and an engine belching black smoke. I'll definitely give it a go though, since I've never seen a game that tries to do anything similar to Jalopy
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The video cover reminds me of the game Jalopy.
Why are you complaining that your fans spun up when playing? they're supposed to do that. It's a red flag when they don't spin up because it means your leaving performance on the table and can turn up your settings, resolution, or frame rate
I have a Ryzen 3 3200G + GTX1650, and never go over 20% total GPU usage on Ultra graphics. No idea whats happening to you.
You sir (and cat) have one of very few channels where when I see a notification, I have genuine excitement for the video. I dare say that the unpredictable upload schedule might be part of that.
The end of this feels kind of awkward. Did you edit it and forget you had already said you were done after the story finished? Because not long after that you're saying you felt like you wanted to continue to and see what the tech tree had to offer etc, but you had already said prior to that you were done and had seen that a huge portion of the tech tree was likely 'post-game'. A bit confusing… Can only assume it's a failure in editing, writing, or you just genuinely didn't know how to end on a more sincere note. It's ok to say a game disappointed you in your closing thoughts 🙂
I think you might be mischaracterizing Seattle a little bit there. Calling it "San Francisco 2" kinda makes me think you haven't been to San Francisco or Seattle (or only been there for like a conventions or something). There are California vibes that just do not exist in Seattle (The Mexican food is not the same). I haven't heard anyone ever say "keep Seattle weird" (I've heard "Keep Portland Weird", but that's a different city in a different state (I have heard "Keep Olympia gross", "The aroma of Tacoma", "Do the Puyallup" but I'm getting off topic). I haven't really seen Gravity Falls but I Washington State does have some… interesting… attractions. For instance there is the largest frying pan in the world, and umm… if you want to take some cosplay pictures I guess there is fort Casey… Also there is the Hanford Nuclear Reservation but nobody really goes there. Concrete high school is kinda unique I guess? Mt Rainer and Mt St Helens is cool to hike around if you are into that sort of thing. Seattle specifically has an underground tour, a fair bit of music venues, and Washington State operates the largest ferry system in the United States or something? And Anchor Steam is nothing like Manny's (although Mac and Jack's or Redhook would be more period appropriate for Pacific Drive).
I am a little saddened to hear that they didn't go all in on the 90s vibes (not that there's anything wrong with that). But there is a lot more than just grunge music. Especially when there was a hip-hop scene with Kid Sensation and Sir Mix-a-lot, and Electronic acts like Faith and Disease. And if you just really want some 90s hipster bait I would think you would put Tullycraft in there (it is 90s indie pop , after all). And the 90s were just a more interesting time form a technology standpoint; you didn't just do everything on your phone that also is a camera that also has gps that also connects to the internet. If you want to call someone, get a quarter! The technology was all on a level that was single function, that most people could easily understand, and we hadn't yet gotten to the point where information was omnipresent. The 90s and Washington State are interesting settings; and I'd really like to see it be really committed to.
Welp; that's about all I have to say about those 15 seconds of throw-away jokes in a 45 minute.
Why not just play snd enjoy instead of comparing it to everything?
missed u dude
It was a snooze with all the gay flag options
The game sounds more like a second job than a game, and with underwhelming story to boot. Think I will pass.
in steam's discovery que, I instantly ignored this one as the screenshots there made it look a yet another low-effort survival game. seems interesting though
charl get the fuck out my backyard, I put a wall up for a reason
I see that Bartender bobblehead….you a Jazztronauts fan, Charlatan? (Or, maybe more likely, just think a cat in a suit looks neat)
Either way, I'm so happy Jazztronauts has a reference in something else too, now. Absolute favorite game.
What a terrible review lol he's even flat out wrong about some things
PD has a good premise but the game is lame, it has the depth of a tech-demo stretched out to 20+ hours
yea the game was pandering trash.
I keep forgetting you're not the cat.
I had to stop playing after 50 hours. Im on the last mission i think but i wanted to get all the achievements but i got burned out 😅
chungus
yeah I had a pretty good time with this one, but I can't say that I disagree with anything you brought up.
it started really, really great for me. the initial outer zone runs were really interesting and every little find was novel and felt like meaningful progress.
mid zone was pretty fun to start. there's a noticeable spike to the hazards, and you get to quickly make a lot of nice upgrades to your car.
then the upgrades plateau, additional tiers feel really marginal and no further complexity is introduced, and the grind really picks up. and that's where the game started to lose me. it didn't suddenly become bad, but all its initial charm had really worn off. and I agree that the hazards got a bit rote. they're intimidating at first, but ultimately very predictable and just not that dangerous. instead of jeopardizing my run, they became, at worst, a small time and resource tax. I quite liked the premise, but the overall execution ultimately felt about 2/3rds of the way there. almost like it was in mid to late early access, like you were suggesting.
I think my favorite part of the game was (unsurprisingly) maintaining and upgrading the car. the trouble is that there just isn't quite enough to it. would have been sufficient for a game of maybe 10-15 hours, but for something roughly double that length, it just got a bit stale. repairing amounts to throwing materials at the problem, crafting is either utterly trivial or tediously grindy, inventory space stays a bit limited, but in a way that ultimately felt annoying, while not actually forcing any truly difficult decisions. the different armor resistance types… exist, but I can't say I ever found them especially impactful.
game began as something really fresh and novel, but finished with fairly little to distinguish it from the many, many other meter-watching "survival-crafting" games the market has been saturated with for years now.
Have you heard of Hedon Bloodrite before? I just saw it in my steam recommended and it looks cool. The steam page claims its an immersive sim, but even if its not it still looks like a badass boomer shooter.
Man, Pacific Northwest Stalker sounds like a great concept, but, shame they didn't do very much with it from the sound of things. Oh well, I might pick the game up if it goes on sale.
I really enjoyed it… But I can agree with your criticisms as well. The story IS thinner than a piece of paper, and yeah, there were not many jump scares or such… I did find a bit more tension around some of the later anomalies and having to mad dash to the gates is always good for a bit of 'oh s*** I hope I make it!' moments. I think some of the lack of flavour comes from Ironwood Studios being a very small indie studio and this being their first game. It will be interesting to see if they intend to expand on it. Good vid. 🙂
There's some things to be desired in the game, and I agree with a good portion of your criticisms. Gotta say, it's … interesting … you spend a significant amount of time complaining that "apocalyptic landscape isn't convenient for resource retrieval."