Get your motor running — this former PlayStation exclusive now takes Xbox players on a horrifying road trip with Game Pass

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Pacific Drive, the first game from Ironwood Studios, lets you experience a scenic drive through a beautifully recreated Pacific Northwest inspired by the 1990s. You’ll cruise along in a classic station wagon, enjoying the open road… but there’s a catch. This world is warped by radiation and instability, creating strange and dangerous anomalies that will try to disrupt your journey.

But who hasn’t had a literal nightmare take over their road trip?

Surviving the Olympic Exclusion Zone with your trusty station wagon

As an analyst, I’ve been looking into Pacific Drive, and it’s shaping up to be a really interesting survival horror game. You take on the role of someone who’s driven into the Olympic Exclusion Zone – a weird, altered version of the Pacific Northwest – in 1998. Things don’t go smoothly; you quickly crash your car and find yourself stranded. The core of the game seems to revolve around finding and repairing an old station wagon you discover in a shed, which becomes your lifeline as you try to survive in these strange redwood forests.

The area around the Olympics, now called the Exclusion Zone, is dangerous and unpredictable. It used to be a testing ground for a secret group called ARDA, and even though ARDA is gone, their experiments left a lasting impact. Strange things are everywhere – bizarre anomalies along the roads, floating junk that almost seems alive, and unsettling mannequins that appear to shift when you’re not looking. ARDA’s testing has made the world unstable, constantly changing, and many objects no longer function properly.

The station wagon looks like something you’d discover hidden in a Forza Horizon game – covered in dust, rusted, and with a flat tire. Luckily, it starts! After a quick tire change and borrowing some gas from other abandoned cars, you can drive it again and continue exploring these unsettling woods. It’s not pretty, but it gets the job done – this is all about staying alive.

As I was driving, the radio crackled to life, and I suddenly realized I wasn’t the only one out here in the OEZ. A man named Tobias came on the air, and he sounded genuinely surprised that I’d managed to find a working vehicle – he kept calling it a ‘remnant.’ It was the first real contact I’d had, and it definitely shifted things.

With Tobias by your side, you’ll be able to survive the initial dangers and reach a mechanic’s garage – which will become your headquarters. The garage owner, Oppy, isn’t thrilled about you rummaging around, but Tobias convinces her to help you with your mission.

Oppy’s garage is a helpful place with tools, old cars you can take parts from, and a dumpster that sometimes yields useful items like chemicals and tires.

Okay, so I’m really excited to start upgrading my station wagon! Oppy and Tobias are walking me through the first round of improvements – some seriously cool tech Oppy cooked up specifically for surviving trips into the OEZ. Honestly, this wagon is *everything* when you’re venturing out into the procedurally generated Zone. It’s my shield, my lifeline, basically my best friend, and keeping it maintained is the only way I’m going to survive. It all comes down to the wagon and how well I take care of it!

Every journey into the Zone is unique, with new dangers hidden among the trees. While exploring, you’ll discover the mysteries of ARDA and the experiments that caused the Zone’s instability.

After finishing your current tasks, you can use a risky technology to open a portal that returns you to your garage. This allows you to improve your equipment and make repairs before continuing your adventure.

A former PlayStation exclusive, available now on Xbox Game Pass

Pacific Drive is the debut game from Ironwood Studios, a Seattle-based team formed in 2019 by experienced game developers. They began working on this survival horror road trip shortly after the studio was founded. In 2024, Ironwood teamed up with Kepler Interactive to publish Pacific Drive on PC and PlayStation, with an agreement that initially made the game exclusive to those platforms before eventually releasing on Xbox.

With the end of its deal with Sony, Ironwood Studios and Kepler Interactive have released Pacific Drive on Xbox, and they’re including some perks for those who waited. Pacific Drive is an Xbox Play Anywhere game, meaning your purchase unlocks it on both Xbox consoles and Windows 11 PCs through the Xbox PC app or Microsoft Store. You can also play on either platform, and with Xbox Cloud Gaming, you can even stream it to your phone or other mobile devices.

Pacific Drive was immediately available to Xbox Game Pass subscribers on both console and PC, letting players explore the OEZ with their station wagon as part of their subscription. Alongside the game’s release, a new expansion called ‘Whispers in the Woods’ was launched, adding 8-12 hours of gameplay and a storyline centered around a mysterious cult within the OEZ.

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2025-11-12 20:40