Pacific Drive: Whispers in the Woods

Maintaining the excellent technical and narrative level of the base game, Pacific Drive: Whispers in the Woods dares to make a significant change in tone, becoming more frightening by evoking ideas and resources from good fantasy horror productions. The DLC adds an extra layer of challenge to the game's standard, and its content is robust and valuable, expanding and complementing this rich, innovative, and intriguing universe that deserves to be explored.

Whispers in the Woods proved to be a good expansion for returning to the Exclusion Zone described in Pacific Drive. It is a long-lasting and pleasantly disturbing adventure, with some quality of life improvements that make the original experience less rough around the edges. At the same time, the DLC reconfirms all the strengths and weaknesses of the title, which continues to be a production for many but not for everyone, mainly due to its underlying repetitiveness accompanied by a rather steep learning curve. If you loved the title, jump in the station wagon and watch out for the whispers coming from the woods.

Whispers in the Woods doesn’t just add more places to explore in Pacific Drive, but also changes how it feels to play, with its eerie Whsipering Woods setting, fresh gameplay mechanics, and unsettling enemy encounters creating an unnerving sense of tension that feels fresh (and, at times, more dangerous than ever). It’s darker, stranger, and more demanding, but it’s also incredibly engaging and rewarding to play. It really does prove that Pacific Drive has plenty of fuel left in its engine (sorry), and if future expansions are just as good as this, I’ll be coming back for a long, long time.

Pacific Drive had a unique hook and rightly deserved praise for its fresh take on the survival crafting genre. Whispers of the Woods offers an alternate starting adventure for new players and rich new content for veteran players returning to the game. It doesn’t radically reinvent the base game, but nails the perfect balance of fresh and familiar that makes DLC most effective.

As much as I love sound design, Pacific Drive: Whispers in the Woods focuses heavily on the folklore-inspired sounds as you explore the forest. Music and Sound are at the core of the experience, from mud sounds, eerie music, scary wind, and car details, everything adds to your exploration. For music, there are tons of licensed and ambient music featured in the game that help during the drives. One of the coolest features is the in-game radio, which immerses you with radio chatter and other characters in-game filling you on lore.

Like an old station wagon though, those flaws don't do much to diminish the charm of the new content in Pacific Drive: Whispers in the Woods. I love how the new content is separate from the main game, and at any point, you can switch between the two route maps and make progress in either. The new content is certainly spookier than the base game, so it's fitting that it's being released a little more than a week before Halloween. The new features of Whispers in the Woods are a fresh coat of paint on the otherwise familiar wagon, and they're a compelling reason to get back behind the wheel if it's been a while since your last Pacific Drive.