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.
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