A handful of characters in Brotato are considered 'solved' by the community, in that their attributes are so debilitating that they leave only one viable strategy for beating the game with that character. Pacifist is one those characters. He is built to do negligible damage and earns money and experience based on the number of enemies left on the field at the end of a wave. Since the player can't thin out the hordes without hurting their wallet, the best course of action is to become as tanky as possible and find a way to keep enemies at bay. There are two weapons that help the player keep their distance from enemies: the open palm, which pushes enemies away, and the stun gun, which slows enemies down.
The open palm is considered the preferable option by far if the Steam Forums and Brotato subreddit are to be believed. The idea is that pushing enemies away creates more distance than slowing them down, on top of being more effective against enemies which are immune to slowdown when they are charging. It makes sense on paper, but the handful (hehe) of open palm runs I tried to do ended in failure. The biggest threat I was facing was enemies approaching between palm strikes and hitting me. This is where the stun gun delivered for me, since it fires in a wide arc at high levels--enemies simply cannot get around it once the player is powered up. Knockback is also much easier to attain from passive items, since the boxing glove is a very common shop item during the early waves and provides good value for money. Enemy slowdown, conversely, tends to be rarer, more expensive, and comes at the cost of your own movement speed most of the time.
That's to assign my success here solely to the stun gun. As you can see, I was able to build up a lot of HP regen and dodge, which allowed me to fall back on survivability when keepaway failed me.
No creachures were harmed in the making of this chost. ☮
