Pacific Drive is not not a scary game. Ironwood Studios’ brilliant 2024 debut is a survival game centered on driving an old station wagon through foggy Pacific Northwest woods in an irradiated exclusion zone where reality is beginning to crumble. It’s about foraging for materials to upgrade your car while avoiding anomalous hazards: strange, tumbling creatures made of scrap metal, pools of radiation, pylons that erupt from the ground. The setting is spooky, and Pacific Drive is engineered to be tense, right down to its randomized gameplay loop.
Still, the game’s first major expansion, Whispers in the Woods — just announced, and due later in 2025 — seems to take things up a gear. The trailer is frightening enough on its own. A grainy filter and handheld-camera style take the game’s desolate sci-fi visuals in a folk-horror direction, further emphasized by a haunting drone-choir soundtrack, stressed-out voiceover, and pagan-looking structures. The mood is a little less Half-Life and a little more Wicker Man (whilst still being very Stalker — both the 1979 Andrei Tarkovsky film and the games it inspired).
“Absolutely, I think we’ve tilted the needle towards horror intentionally,” Ironwood CEO and creative director Cassandra Dracott told Polygon on a video call. “One of the things that I really like about Pacific Drive is the contrast of stories and experiences, whether it’s like a peaceful morning in the rain in your car, or something quite a bit more hectic. And the wonderful thing about having a game with a dynamic setting and a story around you and your car is that you can add a new wrapper or a new idea into it, and it becomes its own experience. And for this expansion, that’s the direction that we wanted to go: Can we give [people] something that is a little bit scarier with intention, and then maybe subvert some of their expectations with how the game works, how some of the rules work while they play?”
Dracott refers to both Stalker and Annihilation and their source novels as inspiration for Pacific Drive and its haunted zone. Whispers in the Woods doesn’t have specific inspirations beyond those, Dracott said, but does draw on the subversive power of horror generally.
“I’m a big fan of the shift in normality that some horror movies take that really makes things unsettling. I like surrealistic fiction for the same reason,” she said. “But if you could go and look at Paranormal Activity, they don’t do a lot in Paranormal Activity, right? It’s questioning the comfort of something that is safe. And we are doing that here. You’ve played the game for 40 hours, you’ve mastered Pacific Drive, you thought you knew everything that was out in the Zone — but maybe you don’t now, and maybe there’s a lot worse things than you thought.”
Whispers in the Woods is a substantial story DLC for Pacific Drive that should take eight to 12 hours to play through, according to Dracott — “I think we’re around a third the size of the base game in terms of how much we’re adding” — and is playable from early on in the game all the way through to the post-game. Dracott is coy about the plot, but says the story is driven by an all-new voice cast, and concerns a “mysterious group of anomaly-obsessed fanatics that have started to make an appearance out in the Zone.”
In gameplay terms, the expansion will introduce new items, anomalies, car parts, and “mysterious things for people to go and find.” But perhaps the biggest addition to (or subversion of) the game will be Artifacts. These take the place of the base game’s Anchors as key items that are needed to make it through an exit gateway at the end of a run and return to your base with loot intact. They also play into the resource and crafting economy, so you’ll want to collect as many as you can.
The catch is that Artifacts, which work similarly to the base game’s system of Quirks that modified car behavior, add potentially dangerous new rules to the game world. If you’re carrying several Artifacts, and their effects stack, things could get very tricky.
“It could be [that] when you jump, your car horn honks, and it takes place anytime they’re in your inventory or in the car’s inventory,” Dracott explained. “So you may find another one that’s when your car horn honks, your car takes damage, and together those create a problem for anyone that habitually bunny-hops in games like myself. But some of them get quite a bit more dangerous, and the way it works is they’re required for progression and for navigating these new maps, but if you hold too many of them, there are some negative consequences. You start to draw the attention of some rather spooky things. We’re really excited for the new kinds of stories and emergent elements that can come from this.”
One thing that clearly won’t change in Whispers in the Woods is the intense relationship the player has with their car, which is simultaneously their avatar and their base, their refuge and their vulnerable charge.
“I wanted to make an experience about isolation and you on the road, and I think it came from a couple of key moments in my life where I spent a lot of time driving,” Dracott said. She remembers being inspired by a rainy drive on the Olympic Peninsula in Washington state, where Pacific Drive is set, in her Hyundai Accent; the car became a station wagon in the final game as a way to ground the surreal experience of the Zone in a kind of comforting Americana. “But at its core it was, ‘What does it feel like to be on the road? What kind of comfort can you find? What kind of different experiences can you have?’ I think we’ve captured a lot of that.”
Pacific Drive: Whispers in the Woods launches on PlayStation 5 and Windows PC later in 2025.
