You can now make Pacific Drive’s weird survival a little less nightmarish with custom difficulty presets

If (like me) you found developer Ironwood Studios’ wonderfully weird four-wheeled survival game Pacific Drive just a bit too exhausting when it launched earlier this year, now might be the time to go back: its new Drive Your Way update introduces a whole bunch of custom difficulty settings and presets to make things easier – or masochistically more difficult, if you prefer.

With Pacific Drive’s new update installed, players can immediately choose from seven presets enabling them to tweak the difficulty of their adventures across the Olympic Exclusion Zone. These range from the standard Pacific Drive experience to Joyride – which retains the same fundamental core but reduces gathering, crafting, and research requirements – to presets that lean hard in the other direction. Nuclear Journey, for instance, smears everything in lethal radiation, while Iron Wagon doesn’t just make things tougher, it deletes your save if you fail.

However, it doesn’t end there; the Drive Your Way update also makes it possible for players to create their own presets, with over 50 considerably more granular settings available – complete with tweakable value sliders for each – as detailed in the video below.

And given Eurogamer’s Chris Tapsell called Pacific Drive a “series of cruel brutalisations” and “horrible pain” in his four star review, that extra help might be appreciated.

Elsewhere in the update, custom music can now be played from local storage on PC, bumpers and wheels are now paintable, and there are two new collectible cosmetics – an antenna topper and mirror hanger – out in the exclusion zone. Additionally, Ironwood has released the paid Anomalous Cosmetic Pack DLC, containing the Mailbox Bunny bobblehead, Sawblade hood ornament, Tourist shifter, Anchor steering wheel, Vacation sticker pack, and Anomaly decal kit.

Previously, Ironwood revealed this latest release would be the second of three updates planned for 2024. Summer brought a photo mode, new car and garage content, plus free (and paid) cosmetics – and following Pacific Drive’s new autumn update, another is due this “winter”. As to what it might contain, that’s currently unclear, with its content only listed as “redacted”.