If it’s been a minute since you drove your trusty patchwork station wagon through Pacific Drive’s exclusion zone, here’s a great reason to gas up for another run. The driving survival game is getting its first major expansion, called Whispers in the Woods, and as you can see in the trailer above, it’s spooky as heck.
While you spent your time in Pacific Drive fleeing all those mysterious anomalies in the exclusion zone, it makes a certain amount of sense that other people would be drawn to them. That’s what this expansion is about: there’s a bunch of weirdos who are really into all that bizarre stuff going on in the woods.
“Witness the rise of a group of Anomaly-obsessed fanatics in this terrifying expansion to Pacific Drive,” says Ironwood Studios, which “takes you deep within a strange and mysterious part of the Olympic Exclusion Zone’s forests. Marked with strange symbols and effigies, these woods are filled with new dangers and mysteries to uncover.”
Last week, PC Gamer spoke to Cassandra Dracott, Ironwood Studios founder, CEO and creative director, to find out a bit more about Whispers in the Woods, the decision to steer the expansion into horror, and what new oddities and features players can expect to find.
“I grew up driving cars in the woods, and that’s my comfort zone. That’s my happy space. But it’s very logical for someone to feel alone in the dark and feel afraid, especially when there are horrifying things making sounds out in the zone,” Dracott said.
“And for us, looking at an expansion, we figured we would lean into that and see what we could actually do with that intention of making something quite a bit more scary. I’ve given myself a jump scare or two playing the base game in Pacific Drive. I have definitely scared myself significantly [more] with the expansion.”
Something completely new the expansion is adding are items called artifacts, Dracott said. “Artifacts are these strange objects that this group makes that you can find, and they’re heavily inspired by what we saw of the organic storytelling that was coming from the quirk system with the game, where things would go wrong with your car.”
Whereas quirks would only haunt your wagon, however, these artifacts can haunt you, too.
“Every single one of these artifacts has a cause and has an effect,” Dracott said. “So one may be, when the player jumps, the car horn honks.” Another artifact could mean that when your horn honks, your car takes damage—so if you had both artifacts, every time you jumped you’d be damaging your car. Artifacts stack.
That makes it sound like artifacts would be something to avoid entirely, but some may have positive or useful effects, and as it turns out, you’ll need them. “They play a major part in how the player escapes from their trips into the zone, where you need to have a certain amount of them in order to actually escape from the zone, make it back to the garage,” Dracott said.
Players can also expect to find new anomalies in Whispers in the Woods, plus changes to some existing ones—though Dracott wasn’t willing to spill the beans exactly what those changes might be. There will also be new parts and cosmetics for your car, and a new set of voiced characters that lead you through the story. There’s been no announcement of the expansion’s price just yet, or a specific release date, though Whispers in the Woods is due out before the end of 2025.
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