“Ghost on the Road” by A Shell in the Pit
Any road trip can be boiled down to its soundtrack: what playlist you made, what podcast you downloaded, what radio station held on for most of the way. My time with Pacific Drive is no exception, as developer Ironwood Studios pack the in-game radio with 26 songs from 27 credited artists. For as familiar as I become with each individual track, hearing them countless times for more than 30 hours, I never spot an obvious order, with one specific tune always following another.
The first one that plays, though, is always “Ghost on the Road” by A Shell in the Pit. The song starts right as I slide into my nameless driver’s POV for the first time and turn the key in the ignition. It’s the 90s, so I check a physical map for instructions (“Stay on the roads”) and toss it into the vacant passenger seat—only the car radio accompanies me on this trip, a delivery to the mysterious Olympic Exclusion Zone that has swallowed the northwestern United States.
The opening guitars are dramatic, almost ill-fitting for my unhurried tutorial journey across winding, wooded roads. It feels like a “real” radio song in that way, not created or curated for a fictional moment so much as emerging by chance out of the waves. The sky grays into rain clouds, as though rising to meet the ominous pitch of the song, which gives way to apocalyptic lyrics over a heartbeat pulse: “Sulfur and smoke” and “rivers for spines / between the dry pines / over bones unbecoming.”
I start the windshield wipers to clear off the raindrops, flip on the headlights to show me the way toward the vast gray walls surrounding my destination. The music garbles into static and then silence. The terrain flickers and bubbles into a vortex that swallows me up, spitting me out on the other side of the Zone’s concrete enclosure. The car does not travel with me, but as I stumble on foot through irradiated brush, I come upon another vehicle: a station wagon shining a single headlight beam into the poison air.
“Doctor Juice” by Leon Laudenbach
It takes me a while to start the music in the new car. At first, the airwaves are occupied by two of the Zone’s quirky residents, who direct me to shelter at an abandoned auto shop that will become my home base for the entire game. Attached to a dingy old gas station, it’s the former stomping ground of Dr. Ophelia “Oppy” Turner, a prickly old scientist who once worked for ARDA, the company at the center of whatever incident birthed the Zone. (And yes, in a happy accident of cultural synergy, we now all know that “Oppy” was also the nickname of J. Robert Oppenheimer.)
I never meet these characters in-person. Oppy and the others are only ever disembodied voices, not so different from the soundtrack in that way. And it’s not until after they go silent that my first-person POV brushes over the ceiling-mounted radio, while I’m fiddling with the big terminal that Oppy has me dig up and install over the passenger seat.
I don’t remember what played the first time I switched on that radio. The song that springs to mind, though, is “Doctor Juice.” Even before I had heard every song several times over, I could immediately pick out this dirty, bluesy ditty from the sleazy guitar riff, the cricket chirp of the backbeat. Sound carries differently depending on how high I set the radio volume, as well as whether I’ve left a car door open and where I’m standing in relation to it. Up until I discover the garage jukebox, I tune up the station wagon with the passenger-side door ajar because it faces the workbench.
These details are everything in Pacific Drive. I can hit a shortcut key for the windshield wipers, but I can also click on the levers near the steering wheel to start them instead. I take slight damage if I close the trunk while standing directly beneath it. Being able to use the radio, to “skip” songs by tuning to another station, is as crucial as any of these small touches to making the car feel tangible, a physical object taking up space in front of me.
Out in the Zone, I get used to hearing the “Doctor Juice” chorus, the repeated croak of “Doctor Juice / Sister Squeeze,” and if I hear the volume fade, that means the car is moving away from where I left it. Sometimes, that’s because a Zone entity has gotten hold of the vehicle, dragging it away with a dangling magnet or zapping the engine to make it charge forward. Other times, it means that I forgot to set the parking brake.
“Forty Fives Say Six Six Six” by King Dude
I should say, “Doctor Juice” is not quite typical for Pacific Drive’s radio. There’s variety to be sure: the synth instrumentals of Eyeliner’s “Los Angeles”, the ethereal longing of Lemolo’s dream pop “Swansea”, the brassy gospel of Mark Crawford and Kenny Lee Young’s “Holy Mystery.”
Much of the soundtrack, though, is of a piece with “Ghost on the Road”, skewing toward rock and especially downbeat folk. King Dude’s “Forty Fives Say Six Six Six” is the most sinister of the bunch, made up of spare acoustic guitar strums and a blasphemous gravel whisper: “Don’t believe in the crucifix” and variations on “All his 45s say 666.” These moodier moments reflect the tensions inherent to traveling the Zone, where the terrain always changes and there’s no mid-game save to fall back on. Everything I need is out there—the raw materials for all manner of upgrades to the station wagon, my own survivability, or the garage itself—and in true survival roguelike fashion, I lose much of my loot if I don’t make it back in one piece.
To return to Oppy’s garage, I have to tear open a portal using energy I’ve accumulated from mechanical orbs across the Zone. The catch is that these orbs act as stabilizers for the ever-shifting terrain, so removing one throws the surrounding area into flux. I’ve snatched an orb and then booked it for the station wagon only for the vehicle to shoot skyward because a geyser suddenly opened underneath.
Other fluctuations occur simply from sticking around too long. Radiation migrates, enemies travel, and storms of area-destroying instability begin swallowing the entire map, which is also what happens as soon as I spawn an exit portal. As careful and as thorough as I might try to be, sometimes I have no choice but to floor it, risking whatever damage may come from a frantic, off-road exit.
“Doctor Juice” by Leon Laudenbach
Pacific Drive is a game of repetition. I go out into the Zone, I scavenge materials, I hear “Doctor Juice / Sister Squeeze” again, I return to the garage, I make repairs.
And how the car needs repairs. Each piece takes individual damage, and deeper into the Zone, one enemy will outright remove parts and fly off with them. Every time I return to the garage, there’s something to work on (and often before that, if I have a spare moment out in the Zone). I get out and I slather on some repair putty, or I break out the blowtorch. Left unchecked, a car part can develop permanent damage, and the only thing to do at that point is find a replacement, which means crafting, which means finding the materials out in the Zone, which is painless enough (at first, anyway).
“The Freeze” by Worse in Person
I don’t recognize anything on the soundtrack, and I like it that way—most of the artists are either local to the Pacific Northwest or have roots in the area, with Spotify listener counts ranging from upwards of 90,000 to just shy of 3,000. Apart from “Ghost on the Road”, none of the songs in Pacific Drive were designed for it, and that’s probably why they work so well, fueling the atmosphere without calling too much attention to themselves. They are not era-accurate, but they feel broadly appropriate.
Worse in Person’s punky anthem “The Freeze”, for example, could slot right into a 90s playlist between trumpet blasts of ska, even though the song is modern. Its Bandcamp page says “2020,” and there’s a Reddit thread from the same year soliciting feedback. The lyrics shout out Bill Nye, that most 90s of science icons, but a line like “My phone, I fuckin’ dropped it” would conjure a much different image to a pre-2000 listener.
Pacific Drive isn’t meant to be an exact recreation of the 1990s—the game plays out in an alternate history, after all—but the signifiers of the era go much deeper than nostalgic window dressing. All that chunky technology is crucial to what the game is going for, a tactility that’s worlds apart from modern, Apple-esque minimalism. At the center of that sensibility is the station wagon itself, an uncool emblem of a time before car companies had so de-emphasized the owner’s capacity for home repair.
Oh, and a lot of the lyrics involve cars. Maybe that sounds a little on the nose, but in practice, it’s quite broad, given the prevalence of cars and driving as metaphor. To tap into world-weariness and overall powerlessness, “The Freeze” uses the imagery of driving a junker: “My tires have gone flat / I did not forget I neglected to pump them / The paint is chipped and the brakes are squeaking / I’m burning oil and something’s leaking.”
“Doctor Juice” by Leon Laudenbach
The car lyrics are everywhere when you start looking for them, even in the broadest possible terms. “Doctor Juice,” which the artist’s website alleges is about an “overzealous chiropractor”, becomes about repairing your vehicle: “She said she would fix my body / in that old-fashion way.” Then, I suppose, there’s “juice” as in the car battery or the gasoline (the Zone has advanced beyond the need for oil), even though in context it’s clearly the, uh, aftermath of when the good doctor “squeezed me till I popped.”
On its own, the car maintenance doesn’t get on my nerves. It’s inconvenient yet still simplified, and it needs to be a bit of both so it can feel purposeful without feeling like directionless tedium. To achieve the elusive ideal of video game immersion, of tangibility and tactility, there’s a sweet spot that a menu screen option to fix everything simply does not reach.
The problem is everything that goes along with the maintenance, the crafting and the scavenging and the traveling in order to do the scavenging. In the early hours of Pacific Drive, scavenging is a simple matter of poking through rusted-out wrecks and abandoned ARDA trailers. I open their containers and hit “transfer all”, heedless of how many different material types there are because any amount of scavenging reliably gets me what I need.
But as the game goes on, the ingredient lists only get longer and more complex. I start needing to track down specific materials before I can proceed, some only found deep in the Zone. Others require certain tools that not only take up inventory space but have limited durability themselves. Everything needs to be replaced eventually.
“Puzzle Pieces” by Lemon Boy
Pieces, car parts. “You’re going way too slow.” You get the idea. We create meaning as much from content as we do from context, from when and where we hear something. We stitch ourselves into the middle of music that speaks to us, as though the singer IS speaking to us.
Lemon Boy’s “Puzzle Pieces” didn’t start out as one of my favorites, but it grew on me over time. Repeated exposure will do that on occasion, fortifying something in your mind rather than wiling away at what you once liked so much. The more I paid attention to the lyrics, the more I felt the raw emotion of the relationship they describe, the desire to do everything for a person: “If you want to, I can be there for you / To pick up all of the pieces / Drag them out.” The singer pitches her voice up on the chorus, as though hedging a bit: I can, and I will, but only if you want to.
Only through repetition does my interaction with the station wagon become a relationship of sorts, much more authentic than the one with Oppy and the other radio folk. The game never gives me a transmitter to respond, so they’re always talking at me rather than with me.
The car, though, involves give and take. I have to maintain the thing, not just patching it up but pumping gas and charging the battery and applying my favored wood paneling to any replacement parts. In return, it gets me around the Zone while holding my scavenged items and acting as my shield, insulating my fragile human body from bolts of electricity or globs of corrosive ooze. I cringe when I ram into a tree, because I know that somebody is going to have to fix the damage, and that somebody is me.
Relationships take work. Some of them take too much work.
“Doctor Juice” by Leon Laudenbach
We listen to media on a drive to occupy ourselves, to distract from how we are sitting in the same position in the same vehicle traveling through a landscape that does not change all that much. The same road cutting through similar fields. With the decline of physical media and the rise of streaming services, there’s an endless rotation of listening material to help ride out the monotony, as long as you’ve got the data plan for it (or at least the foresight to plan some downloads ahead of time).
It seems almost appropriate, then, that the 90s-set Pacific Drive is stuck without enough music to last the whole trip, like someone who forgot a binder full of CDs on a bed or a kitchen table. 26 songs sounds like a lot until that 101 minutes of music has to occupy more than 30 hours of drive time.
And as the soundtrack loses its luster, the monotony grows more intense. The portals I use to conveniently return to the garage are a one-way trip; if I want to get back to some deep-Zone resource hotspot, I need to drive there all over again. The terrain may change every time, but I’m no longer paying attention to the terrain, no longer even stopping—it’s nothing more than the distance between the garage and where I need to go. Road trips are novelties, a once-in-while attraction; the late game of Pacific Drive becomes a commute.
The line between immersion and busywork is razor-thin, and here, the game shifts from one to the other with just a few adjusted variables and a dwindling distraction. I see the resource requirement on the crafting menu, and I groan that I’m missing one thing because all the details that so enraptured me are now miniature roadblocks. I know getting it means more listless cruising through the early Zone, more stopping to grab an orb, more setting the parking brake while I open the trunk to dig around for the tire patching kit.
I still have the radio on. It seems better than silence, but when I hear the opening chirp and swagger of “Doctor Juice”, I change the station.
