One Of s Best Games Is Getting A Huge Horror Expansion

My personal pick for 2024 Game of the Year was Pacific Drive, a game that is hard to describe briefly. It's a game in which you upgrade and repair a station wagon that you drive through a very strange stretch of forest roads in the Pacific Northwest, known in the game as the Olympic Exclusion Zone. It's a game that, at different times, gave me feelings of Stalker, The X-Files, and Remedy's Control, with SCP-like weirdnesses lurking on the roads or in the woods. It wasn't exactly a horror game before, but thanks to its upcoming expansion, Whispers in the Woods, it will be one soon.

Whispers in the Woods is Pacific Drive's upcoming 8- to 12-hour expansion that gives it a haunting overhaul. It's the game's first "true expansion," Ironwood Studios founder and creative director Cassandra Dracott told me, following a number of patches and content updates since the game debuted in February 2024. It'll be playable from within the base game and focuses on a group of "fanatics" who are obsessed with the game's many anomalies.

Back when I reviewed the game, it definitely creeped me out, so I've always felt like it was a horror game, but I learned that wasn't everyone's experience.