Recent reviews by Fluxve

This game is fantastic, and unbelievably addicting.

This game is basically PowerWash Simulator in reverse.

You play as a little pomeranian who has decided to dirty the house. The whole house. Along the way you discover hats, glasses, and other tools to make your muddying job easier. And cuter. Progress is accomplished by dirtying more and more objects, and accomplishing secret goals which will earn you badges for the chaos. Although short (1.5 hours) this game hits all of its goals and doesn't overstay its welcome.

10/10, would dirty again

At its heart, Pacific Drive is a game about diving into the unknown.

This review contains no story spoilers.

You play as a driver who is making a delivery a little too close to the wall of the "Olympic Exclusion Zone", a peninsula in the pacific northwest which has been quarantined following some strange paranormal events in the 1960s. Suddenly a wormhole appears and you are transported through the wall and into the zone. You manage to avoid the radiation and find a small garage with an old station wagon, equipped with a radio connecting you to some of the crazy old scientists who were either too stubborn or too mad to leave this nightmare. They want to help you, and just possibly get you out alive...

Gameplay-wise, Pacific Drive plays like a rogue-lite Subnautica with a Twin Peaks theme. You start at the garage, prepare your car, and then venture into the zone in order to gather resources or progress the story. Along the way you will discover strange new creatures, bizarre new resources, and more than a few unexpected hazards. Your goal is simple: get what you need, and make it back in one piece.

At the end of each run into the zone, you will drive (or limp) back to the garage with goodies in tow. You then sort and store your plunder, perform maintenance on your trusty steed, re-supply, and venture back out. Progress through the game comes from exploring new areas, discovering new anomalies and resources, and building upgrades to allow you to survive and thrive.

The heart of this game is your shelter, transportation, and best friend: a old station wagon, which is somehow connected to all of these strange happenings. Your car provides protection from the radiation, electricity, acid, and other hazards you will encounter in the zone. And even though it's an old clunker (and handles like it), it's still the fastest way to get around.

As you progress through the game you'll be able to upgrade your car with new protective panels, faster engines, grippier tires, extra storage, and more. You can also equip gadgets and abilities to do everything from recharge your batteries to jump over obstacles. By the end of the game your old beat-up station wagon resembles something closer to Ecto-1 or the Mach 5 than a family sedan. In addition to these functional upgrades the game includes a host of cosmetics, from paints and decals to antenna toppers and hood ornaments.

The gameplay is, predictably, repetitive. Gear up, explore, loot, repair, repeat. But Pacific Drive manages to make this satisfying and almost meditative. After each run, I would spend nearly half an hour in the garage sorting through the scrap I had acquired, upgrading what I could, and then repairing any damage to my station wagon before heading out again. This process is meticulous and time consuming, but quite satisfying. The game is full of these little systems for you to maintain, from the wear on your car to your fuel consumption and your battery level. As the game progresses it also provides you tools to make this easier: longer lasting parts, fuel scavengers, battery generators, and more. You can feel your car becoming stronger and more powerful as you delve further and further into the zone.

Speaking of the zone, it is brimming with character and atmosphere. There are a number of defined "biomes" with their own sets of anomalies and resources. Weather is varied and omnipresent, with frequent heavy rain and strong winds that will push your car around and can make it difficult to see. These quarantined areas feel lived in and abandoned, like you're driving through a ghost town where something terrible happened. The zone itself feels like it has a soul and a mood, which can vary from indifference to venomous rage.

Although it's ostensibly present, the story is most generously described as "weak". You never meet or interact with anyone. Instead, characters will chatter away on the radio while you listen in, inevitably telling you to head somewhere or gather something that will help them figure out what's going on. I never felt a particular connection to these characters, and didn't really care about their stories. I was far more interested in the zone itself, which for better or worse is always kept at a mysterious arm's length.

I also felt like the game overstays its welcome. It took me roughly 35 hours to 100% the story and all upgrades, and at the tail end it felt like I was grinding out runs to find resources that I should have already collected. Even at 45 hours, there were plenty of notes and artifacts out in the zone I hadn't discovered. That being said I was quite thorough with my scavenging - if you focus on the objectives it's possible to complete the game in 20 hours or less.

I do have some minor gripes with the game. The controls are initially awkward and take some getting used-to. There are too many car "quirks" which have little-to-no impact on gameplay. And the garage never quite feels like home. But these are fairly minor issues.

All-in-all, I would recommend this game. Although the story may be weak, the Olympic Peninsula is a fascinating setting and the developers nailed the atmosphere. The car is clunky but fun to drive, and upgrades are practical and satisfying. And the gameplay, although repetitive, is engaging and kept my interest throughout.

If you're looking for an exploration game that's moody and mysterious, think about trying Pacific Drive.

Feels just like the old Battlefield games.

I'm not sure why the developers decided to take a puzzle/adventure game and make a significant portion of its sole DLC stealth horror, but here we are.

The DLC takes away much of what made Outer Wilds fun for me: travel, discovery, and the feeling that you're progressing to solve a mystery. The DLC takes place on a new location which prohibits travel by foot, jetpack, and spacecraft. Most of the story discoveries are spoon-fed to the player through a new display system rather than uncovered more naturally. And your progress towards the ending of the DLC, such as it is, seems futile at best and Sisyphean at worst.

But the left turn into horror takes the cake. Frankly the problem isn't even that the DLC is scary (it's not). The problem is that it's literally impossible to see what's going on. You have a small lamp that illuminates about 3 feet in front of you, otherwise it's pitch black. If you stop moving you can focus that beam to see a narrow field straight ahead, but you need to be careful not to accidentally spot any enemies lest they start to pursue you. This is an intentional design choice which makes much of the DLC a slog to get through.

Most of your precious time is spent bumping into walls or avoiding enemies instead of finding clues and solving puzzles. To make matters worse, this area isn't encountered for most players until after the 2 hour refund window has elapsed. Which means you need to either push through or leave the DLC half-finished. After I completed this section I even watched a walkthrough and discovered an area I had missed entirely, simply because it was hidden in the darkness.

The shame of it is that there are a lot of great ideas in this DLC. Many of the mechanics and puzzle solutions are quite clever and well implemented, and in classic Outer Wilds style the difficulty is measured and well paced. But at the end of the day, the frustration of having to fight to be able to see what's going on sucks most of the air out of this space adventure.

ROCK. AND. STONE.

I did not find this game relaxing.

It bills itself as a relaxing puzzle game in the style of Carcassonne - take the next tile, place it where it fits best, and continue until the end of the game. It's the "until the end of the game" part where the relaxation turns into stress.

Each game you're provided a limited number of tiles. When you run out of tiles to place the game ends. To increase the number of tiles in your stack you're given "quests" to complete. These quests fall into two categories: "get N or more tiles of this type in a group" or "get exactly N tiles of this type in a group". A river with exactly 5 tiles, a city with 10 or more houses, a forest with 30 or more trees, etc. These quests grow in magnitude as the game progresses (River with 20 tiles! City with 100 houses! Forest with 400 trees!)

Instead of trying to place tiles to where they best 'fit', matching their features with the terrain, you're forced to cultivate large groups of like features to appease the quest system. You can't have a handful of small towns, you have to have a massive metropolis (that 300+ house goal isn't going to complete itself!). You can't have a countryside with sporadic forests, you have to have a dense wilderness. You can't have several small farms, you have to make an industrial-scale agricultural zone.

This is made worse by the "exact number" quests. You'll simultaneously be dealt a quest for a 200+ group of houses at the same time as a group of 12 (no more, no less) houses. You need to place the tiles close enough to eventually satisfy the former goal while not yet connecting them lest you sabotage the latter. Here's hoping the tiles are contiguous and of the right type: not too large so as to go over the exact number needed, yet not too small so as to "cap" the group and prevent it from expanding further.

The result is a micromanaging nightmare, trying to place your tiles in the exact ways needed to satisfy the quest system while at the mercy of the random tile generator. There is no time to relax, you have to worry exactly how best to place the next random tile so as to put a stopper in the ever-dwindling count of tiles left to place. All you can do is hope that the next tile has exactly two houses so you can complete that 12 house group quest and get 10 more tiles to complete the 200+ grain quest in order to get 10 more tiles to complete the 400+ forest quest which will give you 10 more tiles to complete the 30+ river quest which will get you 10 tiles to

Everything in the game from the art style to the music is designed to be relaxing. Everything except the game itself.

I refunded my purchase.

*honk*

Good rogue-like card game.

A fantastic exploration and adventure game that is as fun as it is deep (literally). Well worth getting your feet wet.