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The short version: If you like survival crafting games, "Tales From the Loop" and taking real life long road trips by yourself, this game was made for you.
The long version:
At its core, Pacific Drive combines the best elements of the retro sci-fi wave (think Stranger Things, Dark, Tales From the Loop) with a compelling driving simulator, and hammers some survival and maintenance elements on top for added depth.
The first thing that needs to be said - this game is lonely. Aside from disembodied voices on your radio, you're the only human being to be found in the Zone. There are no NPCs, no dialog choices, no romantic subplots to woo your favorite waifu back to your auto garage and make her be sworn to carry your burdens. You have to enjoy solitude to enjoy this game, and lucky for me I really do.
The Zone is beautiful in its hauntingly unsettling way. What starts off as familiar-but-twisted in the outer regions steadily transforms into a true hellscape as you near the beating heart at the center of it all. Along the way you'll traverse countless miles of constantly shifting side roads and highways, pillaging abandoned homes and gas stations for crucial items. You're told not to feel badly about doing this, because "most of these structures won't even be here when you next return" - and it's true. As explained in the lore, the Instability of the Zone is constantly writing and rewriting reality and this plays out in the gameplay mechanic of each map (called Junctions) being randomly rerolled and procedurally generated each time you visit. No two runs are ever the same, even if you follow the same route.
This has the effect of making it that you're never totally sure what you'll encounter. An array of available car upgrades allows you to try to protect yourself from the worst of things in the form of various panels and doors with different elemental resistances, but it's impossible to get them all at the same time; protecting yourself against radiation leaves you vulnerable to explosions. Protecting yourself against explosions leaves you vulnerable to electric shocks. You have to choose what to mitigate against and then trust your driving skills to get you through the rest. It's fun, and also stressful.
I have to admit that I felt a big degree of disappointment in the first few minutes of the game, when your own car is destroyed by the Zone and you come across the station wagon which is the centerpiece of Pacific Drive. A station wagon?? Why couldn't it be something cool? A vintage Land Rover, a Jeep, a muscle car on lifted suspension and knobby 33" rims? Why was I being doomed to survive the Zone in the same kind of car my neighbor's mom used to take us to soccer practice in?
But, to my surprise, the car started to grow on me - as they always do. The game bakes this queer effect into the story too, positioning the car as a mysterious "Remnant" with the One Ring-like effect of compelling its possessor into a supernatural obsession with it until, we're told, the bearer eventually goes mad with the compulsion and wanders off into the Zone with their Remnant to never be seen again. I wouldn't say the old woody station wagon ever got quite THAT attached to me, but after the first few runs I did start to feel a bond forming with my car. For some people vehicles are just a means to get from A to B, but for "car people" they take on a life of their own. I've experienced it in real life and it's wonderful the way they somehow managed to bottle that feeling and reproduce it in Pacific Drive.
Slapping repair putty around on the car's deteriorating panels and scrambling to patch up ruptured tires, all while surrounded by radioactive clouds and being pursued by a reality-dissolving storm, really reinforces the idea that you're responsible for the car's survival because the car is the only thing that can keep you alive. Standing outside of its protective shell for too long is a death sentence in the Zone, and its interior is warm, dry and safe - but only as long as you keep it in good repair.
As you learn to navigate the Zone's cruel and capricious dangers you start to unlock increasingly complex and helpful upgrades for both your car and your personal protective clothing. The mechanic's garage which serves as your home base receives a steady supply of improvements, including expanded storage for crafting components and automotive parts.
On the default difficulty settings I started to feel, in the second half of the storyline, that some of these upgrades were overpowered. I was drowning in excess of materials, fuel and tools because a handful of features of my car and garage - especially the car's protective shield bubble and the garage's automated repair features - had reduced what would previously have been a death-from-a-thousand-cuts into minor inconveniences that would be taken care of the next time I warped home. Where early on I was rationing my repair putty and venturing back out with crucial automotive parts at half health, at the end I was throwing my putty in the trash compactor and never leaving the safety of my garage at anything less than perfect condition.
For me, I can now play the game on a steeper difficulty and hopefully get a little more of that scarcity and struggle that I want from games like this, but it's nice that out of the box Pacific Drive is not "Dark Souls hard" and it can just as easily be tuned to provide the calming experience of a relaxing drive through the (apocalyptic) countryside for players who are looking for that instead.
By the end of the game, I was in love with my rugged little car. As a player who values aesthetic just as much (or slightly more) than gameplay effectiveness I'd managed to cobble together a combination of upgrades and auto parts which both gave me good stats and also looked awesome - or, at least, as awesome as a 1985 Oldsmobile Delta 88 is ever going to look. These things are subjective in the Zone.
What gripes I do have with the game are minor. The soundtrack, while awesome, is far, far too short for a game about long road trips. The half-dozen or so songs that play on the radio start to wear thin after the umpteenth time you've heard them and it's impossible to go for a 3 hour run without getting sick of the radio music. While I can appreciate the limitations for a small indie developer to bankroll a massive playlist, it would have been a nice touch to at least be able to tap into my own Spotify and use playlists of my own. That being said, it's cool that they managed to create new music that captures the various styles of music that were popular back in the mid-80s. It's a shame that it's really only one song per genre, though.
A bigger gripe is simply that those 3 hour runs I just mentioned are unavoidable later in the game. There is a gararge upgrade that grants you a means to fast-track to your final destination along highways, but there's no way to reach the Deep Zone without slogging through at least a few unneeded and unwanted Junctions along the way. On the one hand, structuring the game this way really makes it feel like delving into the deepest reaches of the Zone is a long and exhausting trip but on the other hand, it's disrespectful of the player's time to force them into the busy work of driving across maps just to make them drive across maps.
Despite those flaws, Pacific Drive is one of the best games I've played in the last year or so. I can't recommend it enough.