A Star Long Cold aims to blend Antonio Freyre's previous No Sun to Worship and It Comes In Waves. Unfortunately, it lacks neither the concise brevity of the former and the meditative emptiness of the latter. I don't think it's a bad game – I love the atmosphere and the visual style, I just don't think the core gameplay loop coalesces into something that I feel compelled to return to after a few runs.

I've seen folks talk of this game as superior to It Comes In Waves by virtue of sidestepping its extended periods of nothingness, but the action of Under A Star Long Cold often feels more vacuous than the literal emptiness of It Comes In Waves's desert.

It's worth checking out as a fan of Freyre's work, and as mentioned – it's extremely successful stylistically. I just wish I liked pretty much anything else about it.

High Score of $26,580/$50,000

Pacific Drive is a new game that’s basically Stalker… with a station wagon. And brother, lemme tell ya, you’re gonna love the way you look in this wagon.

This beauty’s gonna be your lifeblood as you explore the mysterious post-apocalypse (??) of the Pacific Northwest, raiding gas stations, research bases, and derelict shacks for everything from fabric scraps to plasma canisters, which you’re going to use to craft upgrades and repair kits for yourself, but more importantly - your car.

See, when you first start, your car’s going to be a piece of shit. You’ll be trying your best to drive through overgrown pacific forests on spare tires and hope, with your body panels literally being held together by duct tape. But as you go further and further on, you’ll be replacing these shoddy components with rugged off-road tires, armored bumpers, roof racks, literal jump-jets, and electric coils to blast off anything that might cling to your car.

Because that’s another thing - you’re not just moseying around out there in the forest and small towns with you and your car. You’re doing all that while dodging a heaping helping of anomalies - ranging from helpful repair critters to devastating buzz-saws and creepy exploding mannequins. These anomalies are well-and-good as you’re looting, but everything ramps up to 11 when it’s time to extract - by the way, did I mention this is an extraction looter? Anyways - when you’re extracting, you’re opening up a temporal portal to warp you back to homebase, and the new denizens of the forest don’t like that. So now, you’re on a timer, screaming over hills and ditches, down mountains, all the while trying to avoid anomalous ley lines that hurl you up into the sky if you touch them, or abducting machine-beasts that will try to steal your car with you inside of it. It’s a white-knuckled exciting thrill-ride that turns the slow methodical looting leading up to it on its head.

When you finally get back to base, you’ll be given a chance to use your hard-earned loot to upgrade your car, as mentioned, but you’ll also get the chance to diagnose some… quirks… that your car develops in the Zone. See, your car is sort of anomaly itself, so sometimes you’ll get little mechanics gremlins that are simple - everytime you shut your trunk, the car beeps. Small, endearing foibles that feel like honest-to-god quirks you’d expect from an old well-loved car. But then you’ll get more.. Anomalous quirks. Stuff like, whenever you turn on your windshield wiper your car jumps upwards into the air, or when you turn the steering wheel to the left, your gas pedal slams to the floor.

These quirks are probably my favorite system in the game, because they’re developing while you’re in the zone. So you could be three sectors deep into your run before realizing that whenever you turn your headlights on, your car shuts off - so you augment your behavior around that newfound quirk. The best part, is that a lot of the time you’re not going to immediately realize what’s occurred. You’re probably just going to think - huh, that’s weird, why does my car keep cutting off? That’s because in order to fix the issue, you need to actually diagnose it first. You need to know that, not only your car is shutting off, but WHY it’s shutting off - what action is triggering it.

I know I’ve spent a healthy portion of this short review raving about this system, but I genuinely think that it’s such an awesome way to tie the gameplay into the feeling of owning and keeping an old beater car running. You develop a real attachment to the car as you’re tinkering with it, painting it, and fixing it up when it starts to buckle. It’s a system that works waaay better than I was expecting it to, which is a good thing, because the game’s best qualities sorta stop and end with the car and your interactions with it.

Looting the abandoned buildings and research stations is pretty dull, to be honest. They’re the same buildings, and nothing really changes, except for where the toolboxes are. For huge portions of the game, there’s basically nothing to threaten you while you’re on foot, so you’re just doing busywork gathering materials before getting back to your car. And it’s fun for awhile, gathering stuff that you know is going to be pumped into meaningful upgrades. But the abstraction of materials to plastics, scrap metal, rubber, etc means that you’re kind of just making the numbers go up. It’s not a strictly bad thing, and it seems clear that the game is doing this to further its ambitions to create something that isn’t another extraction shooter, but some small part of me can’t help but pine after this with an extra layer of imm-sim shooter spread over it.

With that small quibble aside, I really can’t recommend Pacific Drive enough. It’s a fantastic game that had me one-more-running well into the night.