A few hours into playing the Whispers In The Woods expansion for Pacific Drive, I started having deja vu to when I played Echoes Of The Eye expansion for Outer Wilds. In both cases, I was playing a hotly-anticipated, horror-themed expansion for games that I thouroughly loved. And in both cases, I wasn't enjoying the horror-themed systems as much as I thought I would. In the case of Outer Wilds, this was largely due to being exhausted by being a new dad. In the case of Whispers In The Woods, I was similarly emotionally exhausted by family drama that was happening in the holiday season of 2025. I just didn't have as much patience as I needed to play either of these games.

In both expansions, the fundamental gameplay and experience is actually changed considerably from the base game. For Pacific Drive, the methodical exploratory nature of the base game gives way to a much more high-pressure and goal-oriented approach. The base game was all about scavenging the levels for every resource that wasn't nailed down. It was about managing risk and seeking rewards. Or at least, that was how I played it. In the expansion, however, I started feeling like the intent is for the player to get in, get what you need, and get out as quickly as possible!

The big difference between these 2 expansions seems to be their reception by their respective communities. While I was a discordant voice in a harmony of near-overwhelming praise for Outer Wilds: Echoes of the Eye, I am just another noise in the cacophony of mixed and conflicting opinions about Pacific Drive: Whispers In The Woods.

Upon booting up the game with the DLC installed, the garage will be transformed by a mysterious cult.

Spooky stand-alone drive

Perhaps the most controversial aspect of Whispers In The Woods is that it has an economy and progression system that is completely detached from the core game's economy and progression. On the one hand, this provides a roughly consistent level of challenge, whether you're starting the expansion content a few hours into a new save file, or if you're using it as an excuse to re-visit the game after already having put hours into the post-credits free play. On the other hand, it means that, if you were at the end of the main campaign (or beyond), it really feels like the game is forcing a hard reset. And if you are still early in your campaign, a detour to play the expansion will feel like just that: a detour. Aside from the incidental collection of normal resources, you won't be doing much (if anything) that will progress the main campaign, upgrade the garage, or make meaningful permanent upgrades to the car.

Conversely, if you make a pit stop at a cabin or trailer to scavenge for resources, and only find normal, base game materials, it can be insanely frustrating. I recommend having a resource radar handy, so that you know whether a particular scavenging stop is worth the time and effort -- especially if you already have a pneumatic locker or 2 full of an entire campaign's worth of normal crafting resources back in the garage.

You have to re-grind for parts to craft new "attuned" car parts.

Essentially, the expansion creates "attuned" variations or equivalents of many of the game's resources and car parts, which you must now collect from scratch. In fact, during my first visit to the Whispering Woods, all of my car's late-game parts and equipment (that I already had installed) were rapidly damaged and rendered defective. All those insulated and anti-corrosion doors and panels that I had equipped all were rendered "fragile" by the time I returned to the garage for the first time, forcing me to scrap them. When I go back to the main game, I'll have to re-craft all of those. And if I had still been at the early stages of the final act of the base campaign, in which the materials for insulated and anti-corrosion parts are limited, I would probably be pretty pissed by the setback.

And if you want to switch between playing the expansion content or progressing the base game campaign, you'll have to take your whole car apart and re-equip the appropriate parts every time you put a Whispering Chart in or out of the Z.E.T.I. route analyzer.

The expansion areas seemed to almost instantly break
all my advanced base-game car parts!

I also had frequent problems with my Off-road wheels going flat or bald, and I felt like I was constantly replacing them -- long before I had found blueprints to create the attuned wheel equivalents. And once I had the attuned engine, headlight, and wheel parts available, I discovered that many of them need to be "fueled" by placing certain resources in their inventories. They aren't repaired by Repair Putty or other vanilla tools. The unique fuel and repair requirements of attuned equipment added extra, tedious, refueling requirements to runs that were already under plenty of time pressure.

Civilization VII is right around the corner. For the first time in the Civilization series' history, it will actually have competition in its specific niche. One of those competitors is Microsoft's Ara: History Untold. Of the various games in the "historic 4x grand strategy" genre, Ara might very well be the most unique -- both to its benefit, and also to its own detriment.

Part Civilization, part city-builder

In addition to the obvious comparisons to Civilization, Ara: History Untold feels almost as much like a medieval survival-village-crafting game along the lines of Banished, Settlement Survival, or Manor Lords. The bulk of the game is spent building resource harvesters, building crafting buildings, and then trying to set up an efficient and self-sufficient economic engine that converts those harvested resources into manufactured goods. As you research new technologies and advance through the eras, you'll unlock new resources and recipes for new things you can craft with those resources. In fact, most of the tech tree is dedicated to unlocking new resources and craft recipes.

There is a huge variety of resources and manufactured goods.

The limited space available to each city will prevent you from ever really feeling like you've built a perfectly efficient machine. There's enough different crafting buildings, enough different resources, and enough different crafting recipes that you won't have enough room to build all the collectors and crafters for everything. So you'll be switching what crafting building is crafting what goods periodically, as certain infrastructure or units may require specific goods. Goods can also be assigned to buildings in order to "accelerate" their crafting efficiency, or to the cities directly in order to satisfy the needs of the population or to provide passive buffs.

For example, if you build a butcher shop in one of your cities, you can assign it to craft either salted fish or salted meat. If you choose salted meat, then you can assign a cow, pig, or venison, as well as optional salt or spices in order to speed up the production of that meat. You can then take that crafted meat and assign it to a city to provide extra food for the population.

Similarly, you can harvest raw iron ore from mines, process them into ingots in a forge, then combine the iron ingots with coal in a foundry to produce steel. That steel can then be used to create everything from skyscrapers to house more population, to luxuries like consumer automobiles and refrigerators, to tanks and battleships.

Candles can be equipped into housing to improve the knowledge rating of the residents.

And there are so many things that you can craft. There's candles, furniture, pottery, linen, medicinal herbs, pastries, coffee, microchips, and so forth. These sorts of items can be assigned to other buildings to provide certain passive benefits. A candle, for instance, can be assign to a residential dwelling to increase the "knowledge" rating of the city, which speeds up your technology research rate. Presumably, the people living in that dwelling are using the candle light to study books and learn things through the night. Similarly, metals, glass, and fuels can be used to craft lampposts, which can be installed in cities to reduce crime and improve the city's security rating.

I really enjoyed Pacific Drive, but I admit that I struggled a bit in the early hours. The tutorial is decent, but it's a bit of an information overload, and the player doesn't really get much opportunity to practice certain mechanics so that they sink in.

So I wanted to share some of my tips based on the confusions and growing pains that I experienced, so that other new players can hopefully shorten the learning curve and get to enjoying the game more quickly.

When I first saw the trailers for Pacific Drive, it was being pitched as a survival horror that takes place entirely in a car. Or at least, that was my takeaway from the initial announcements and teasers. It had me intrigued, such that I immediately wishlisted the game. However, that isn't quite what the game ended up being. Instead, Pacific Drive is more of a survival/crafting/extraction game with light-to-moderate horror elements. There's also an emphasis on logging and cataloguing everything you encounter, which nullifies much of the horror and mystery that it could have, in favor of encouraging exploration and curiosity.

The bulk of the gameplay consists of driving to different parts of the map, scavenging for materials and supplies, and using those materials to craft upgrades for your possessed station wagon. And all the while, you're scanning almost everything you encounter in order to catalogue it (from paranormal phenomena, to resources and equipment, to the different types of wrecked vehicles you find rusting along the roadside, and everything in between). Maybe I misunderstood those initial announcements and teasers. Whether I misunderstood, or the game's concept was poorly communicated, or its design simply shifted over the course of the intervening year or so (which happens), the final game errs much closer to No Man's Sky than to Resident Evil, and might even have tiny hints of inspiration from things like Outer Wilds and Portal.

The crafting focus also means that the gameplay is split almost evenly between driving and scavenging on foot. I'm constantly getting out of the car to search an abandoned building for materials, or using the various tools to break down other wrecked vehicles for their constituent parts. So the idea that the game would be played entirely from within the car also ended up not being the case. In fact, a majority of my opening hours of the game were played on foot, since so much of the early game is a series of tutorials on how to craft various tools and car parts.

Pacific Drive can be serene and beautiful, and almost zen-like.

So Pacific Drive takes a while to really get going. Whether it's the sub-genre-defining horror game that I anticipated, or a more trendy survival/crafting/extraction game with a driving gimmick, Pacific Drive still turned out to be quite good and addicting. In fact, the survival and extraction focus might even have made it a better game than what I was envisioning in my own mind.

Grab 'n' Go

Pacific Drive's core gameplay loop is more akin to an extraction shooter, except that it's single-player PvE (Player vs Environment), and the player uses a possessed, beat-up old station wagon as your primary method of locomotion and eventual escape. You choose an area from a map menu, and the specific details of the area are pseudo-randomized each time you enter (and can change if you return later). You drive around the area, collecting any resources or materials you find, avoiding paranormal hazards, and occasionally finding documents or audio logs that slowly explain what happened to the Olympic Peninsula Exclusion Zone.

But there's also a ticking clock, and this is where the "extraction shooter" influence appears. If you lollygag too long, meticulously avoiding obstacles, and gingerly collecting everything that isn't nailed down, a blaring siren will sound, and a mysterious Fortnite-esque "storm" will slowly engulf the area. If you get caught in the storm, you'll slowly take damage until you either escape or die. And the only way to escape is usually to trigger a warp portal that appears somewhere on the map. These portals can only be activated if you're more than a certain distance away, and once activated, the storm starts to rapidly expand. You have only minutes to drive halfway across the map to the portal and escape, with the storm breathing down your neck.

Each voyage is punctuated by a frantic race to a gateway portal.