Tacoma

I'm not against walking simulators, but they need to have a lot going for them in story, characters, and general mise-en-scène in order to justify their existence. Tacoma does successfully construct the atmosphere of an abandoned space station. You watch recordings of absent characters and are then able to interact with objects and computers they've left behind to piece together their lives and motivations, and what ultimately happened to them. However, the characters don't have a lot of depth or personality. They are all unambiguous "good guys" who care about each other and their families back home. In fact, the game very quickly sets up the dynamic that everyday people (and the labor unions that represent them) are Good, while corporations are Bad. The player is reminded of this at every possible beat-you-over-the-head-with-it opportunity. I kept playing because I was curious if I would be given the option to pick sides, to decide whether to make a selfish or an altruistic decision. Spoiler: There is never any choice. Having a modicum of player agency could have improved the game, of course. But even with no influence over the story's direction, it could have benefitted from some nuance. A sympathetic corporatist character could have been interesting. Instead, having just finished it, I ask, "Really? That's it?" A predictable short story, and not much else.

It's the new game by the makers of Gone Home. It's good (and better), played at your own pace and story-focused, where the draw is exploring the microcosm that the game presents to you and seeing what makes it tick. It's not about challenging action set-pieces, surviving the elements or complicated puzzles. Based on that you should already know whether you're going to like it or not.

Gone Home was a walking simulator with an interesting personal story to make up for the lack of any meaningful game interaction. It benefited greatly from focusing on a fully fleshed out personal story. This is not that game. It is another walking simulator with a story contrived of common science fiction tropes with no true personal connections. Like Gone Home you get glimpses of personal lives of various people but unlike Gone Home there is nothing compelling enough to make you truly connect or care to any of the characters. I appreciate the devs and encourage them to continue their work and testing/expanding the medium but on this one it feels like they attempted to replicate the success of the original while abandoning what truly made it special. It attempts to cover the personal stories of 6 times the characters in the same amount of time. Through an interesting concept of replaying recorded past events it expands the potential of story interaction but the payoff of that mechanic is disappointing at best. I'd give it a pass.

*MILD SPOILER WARNING* Tacoma could've been an interesting narrative experience where you explore an abandoned transit space station, piecing together the events leading up to a life threatening accident through augmented reality, and be an innovative new entry in the walking simulator genre. Instead we just get an utterly dull slog where everything of real interest has already happened. We're not on Tacoma to find out why the crew disappeared, died or can't communicate with Earth, they made it back and we're just there to do some post evac maintenance on it's AI. Checking out the AR logs of what happened just to kill time while the AI is bit by bit downloaded in to a storage unit. The AR aspect could've been interesting, seeing people's events playout in real time like a VHS player and even makes the game ideal for VR, but with a handful of exceptions none of the recordings are particularly interesting or of any real significance. Just first world problems stuff. To make it worse it's obvious this is a very short game so there's no gradual escalation of tension as the AR recordings playout, one minute it's oh crap where gonna die, then we jump to let's have sex in case we don't make it. No side plots, personal politics or anything to spice the narrative up, hell it even screws up the most basic world building aspect any game can have, text logs. Thanks to the fact the majority of them are just inane personal texts between the characters and others that aren't part of the story, or have been corrupted, like some of the recordings, becoming unreadable in large chunks and serving no purpose. A much better narrative experience is Get Even, while that screws some things up it's shortcomings are forgivable because at least it's solidly designed at the base and has good story. Tacoma could've been an interesting narrative experience but instead barely uses the few good ideas it has and falls prey to the worst crime it's genre can commit, be detached and boring.