As the AAA Games Industry continuously wonders why it's head hurts so bad where the lobotomy scar still lingers, we once again find solace in smaller games and studios. Coming from Ironwood Studios, who popped their cherry with this release, is Pacific Drive, a survival/exploration game set in the Pacific Northwest of the United States. Much like your first time as the solo dude in a three-way, it's an odd, stressful yet enjoyable and exciting experience. Full of odd noises, interesting visuals, and the hope you're doing well enough and trying not to blow your load before pulling out of somewhere dangerous.
The main gameplay loop revolves around you exploring, scanning, and scavenging around a quantumly (LIM) fucked exclusion zone with your trusty Station wagon companion. Attempting to escape madness and the groundhog's day deathloop of the zone. In that it's a rougelike game revolving around exploring and looting, then using said loot to upgrade your car, then travel farther to loot more stuff and further upgrade your car, and so on and so forth. Which, like laying the groundwork for your three-way, sounds kind of tedious, and at times, it can be, but overall, it's an enjoyable game. The story, like girl number three who drunkenly agreed to do it with you and your girlfriend, isn't much to write home about and is a bit predictable, but is more than adequate to get the job done.
However, like the morning after, we both seem to have caught a bug we can't come back from. At a certain point in the story, roughly 15-20 hours in, the location in which I need to go to progress the story, crashes on attempting to load, and then corrupts the save file. Fortunately, I had multiple savefiles, because of paranoia. Unfortunately, the bug corrupted two of my three, and the third was about 5 hours of progress behind. Even worse, is that reloading back to that file and progressing back to the same point had the same end result: crashing and corrupting. Thus rendering the game seemingly uncompletable, and forcing me to watch the rest of the fun from the hotel cuck chair against my will.
While I was ready to give this game a solid 8ish depending on how the last stage of the late game played out, it blew its load a little too early and brought itself down to a 6. The time I got to be apart of was enjoyable, but was tragically cut short by a broken condom... I mean save system. Despite the positive score, I cannot, however, recommend it either, as a quick search has revealed that there are more than a few others that have encountered the same, and there is something to be said about the fact that I want to still play it on a fresh file.