Vehicle Horror Survival Is My New Favourite Genre (2025)

There’s nothing quite like forming an attachment with a hunk of metal as you traverse a wild, apocalyptic land. Whether that be a train in Choo Choo Charles, or your beaten up motors in My Summer Car and an everlasting Finnish summer, the combination of methodical mechanics, potential Eldritch horrors, and the wide open road of exploration make the perfect recipe for a game to get yourself lost in. This is why I played Pacific Drive at Gamescom 2023.

This is a run-based first-person vehicle horror survival game, set in an exclusion zone in the Pacific Northwest. I sat down with game director Seth Rosen, who referred to this type of game as a ‘roadlite’, which I like, so I’m stealing it. He took us through an overview of the initial garage which acts as your home base - where you can upgrade, tweak, and tune your trusty steed - and then gave us the chance to test out some of the key mechanics in the game… which mainly means driving.

RELATED: F-Zero 99 Is The Chaotic Racing Game I Forgot I Wanted

Driving is obviously an important part of a vehicle survival game. It’s the foundation that the entire experience rests on. Thankfully, the driving in Pacific Drive is great - it’s also quite chunky, like you can feel the weight of the vehicle as you drift around the muddy track behind the garage. This is important, because when I asked Rosen what sort of exploration you can get up to in Pacific Drive, he told me that the “vast majority” of the content can be enjoyed just a few steps from the road at any time. You’re going to spend a lot of time in your car.

In terms of upgrades and maintenance, you can do some bits and pieces on the fly with your handy repair tools, but a lot of the tweaks and upgrades will be done at home. This gives the game its run-based nature: head out into the anomaly-filled exclusion zone (more on that in just a moment), then go back with your gathered resources to make improvements to your ride. The car has different abilities that can be activated, as well as weapons and other interesting bits and pieces, like extra storage or armour.

The exclusion zone itself looks damn good - dark and atmospheric, it has the fabric of a horror game, but what I love most about this genre is that you don’t even need something scary to feel horror. There are enemies in Pacific Drive, but they’re few and far between, at least in the starting zone we got a glimpse of, but it’s the unknowing, the lack of anything scary that sent the sharpest shivers down my spine. Staring out into those dark woods or along a dusty road obscured by fog, that’s the real scary shit, knowing that the only thing separating you from a gnarly death is a few inches of steel.

My interactions with the enemies, these ‘anomalies’, were interesting. They damaged my car, for sure, but they also managed to chuck me at 100 mph down the road. Rosen said that sometimes you might actually want to interact with the anomalies, because they can help as well as hinder you. This was also only a small glance at what sort of horrors lie in the exclusion zone. I hope that there is more to see and explore in later parts of the game, but our preview session didn’t extend beyond the first couple of roads.

Overall, Pacific Drive is a high fidelity vehicle survival game with some horror elements - the creeping sensation that someone is watching your car from just beyond the reach of your headlights, ew, gross, horrible - which plays into modern roguelite mechanics. Venture out, explore a broken landscape, collect some scraps and other goodies, while avoiding enemies that linger around PoIs. It’s a brief and early glimpse at Pacific Drive, but I can’t wait to see more.

NEXT: Dig Tunnels And Build Massive Castles In Enshrouded