Pacific Drive, on Game Pass and PlayStation Plus, is a banger in more ways than one

Many video games refine, redirect, or perfect existing genres. A rare handful invent new ones. Quite a few blend genres to freshen either one or both. And then there are games which take, two, or three, or more genres and throw them into an unholy stew that creates something original and unrepeatable — not the start of a new genre, but a total one-off.

I love games like this, and my favorite of the last few years is Pacific Drive: an apocalyptic sci-fi-horror survival roguelike road trip simulator, currently available on both Xbox Game Pass and PlayStation Plus.

In Pacific Drive, it's some time in an alternate 1990s and you're exploring the Zone, a bizarre, irradiated wasteland in the Pacific Northwest that's been abandoned since a science experiment went wrong in the 1950s. Your transport for this adventure is a creaky old station wagon which you progressively customize into a valiant, specialized, exclusion-zone-exploration vehicle.

In the game's slender plot, your character has some kind of psychic bond to this car. Honestly, developer Ironwood Studios needn't have written this in. You're guaranteed to develop a symbiotic relationship with, and deep fondness for, the rickety old banger as you play.

Pacific Drive is all about pushing deeper and deeper into the semi-randomized Zone map as you seek to uncover its mysteries on missions and self-directed runs. The aim is usually to get to an endpoint, or just as far as possible, and gather material for upgrades as you go.

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