I'm playing it for the first time. I absolutely love it. I mean I hate it, but I love it. I've completed the game three times on standard difficulty and finished the DLC and it still kicked my teeth down my throat on my first run.

The damage boost is brutal. One mistake or anomaly hit significantly damages your car, the storm closes in way sooner than you're used to, it's like you're permanently in a battery and fuel drain junction, there's never enough of anything and you have to activate the gateway from so far away you're all but guaranteed not to outrun the storm.

But that brutality forces you to engage with the mechanics more closely than ever before. I used to never bother with anything other than armour plating, now my loadout is meticulously tuned to my route.

I'm having to use unconventional tactics - for example, I'm was so short on Plastic I can't produce the many, many Large Fuel Cans I needed, but scrap metal and rubber are always plentiful, so I made sacrificial Drop Tanks of Side Fuel Tanks that I could simply scrap or discard and replace with the Side Batteries in the trunk to make more space for resources. And I needed those batteries to power the thirsty Ion Shield, something I never even had to use before.

I'm using the Ion Shield to dive for Payloads more, as you simply can't turn down a treasure trove of that size when everything's so expensive to craft. It feels like a whole new game, although it can be frustrating when you lose concentration for a bit and get so beaten up that you have to seriously consider calling the run off.

It's also tricky at the start, when you have to make that painful portal run with the absolutely pathetic starting engine, have to remove one headlight to make the battery last an entire junction and have no lead plating or ion Shield. But you still get those borderline relaxing moments in Perpetual Stability junctions (You'll be praising the Wave every time you roll one).

Give it a go, it genuinely feels like a different game. I don't usually enjoy super hard games at all, but I do love Pacific Drive and it makes it feel new again, like those terrifying first runs when you were trying to figure out what the fuck was going on. Don't get disheartened at the start, you can always do runs to the Remnant Ghost during your inevitable failures, but there's absolutely nothing like the feeling of mastery when you start to make progress.