Tacoma

If you like an adventure game it's not bad. It isn't the greatest adventure, but it is an interesting enough game to spend a few hour on. Kind of reminds me of Myst to an extent. It does paint an interesting, if dystopian view of the future. A bit of a commentary on capitalism running unchecked. Corporate universities, and Corporate Loyalty in lieu of traditional currency. There's a lot of interesting lore and worldbuilding underneath the surface. It could be better. And it does have some standard sci-fi cliches. But if you want a relatively quick little adventure to play in a single session, or over a few sessions, it's fun enough.

Tacoma feels like a bigger more sci-fi version of Gone Home. I mean that as a compliment. The idea is the same, you’re going around finding out what happened but this time you are doing so by finding logged recordings of events that took place. You can also go through various crew members offices and personal spaces to get to know the people better as well as provide context to some events. The overall story is well done and the only thing I would have changed is one plot point I wished I had an option to do the right thing or go evil on. The characters are fleshed out well and you feel like you get to know about them by the end. The few puzzles in the game are in the form of finding out what passwords are and I liked that many of them could be found through simply exploring. They were often neither too easy or too hard to come by although other times they just flat out give them to you. Part of me wants to criticize the game for not having a list of objectives but to be fair the game didn’t really need one. You go to each area, set up the transfer module to copy AI data and while that copies you explore the area to find logged events and learn more. If you’re taking the time to actually watch the events the transfer will be done long before you’re through. If you’re not exploring then well you’re missing out. The graphics had a clean style to them that made think a little of 70’s or 80’s sci-fi movies. They weren’t mind blowing in detail but they weren’t bad either. The game does have music for some of the events but it was background music that the characters were listening to, there isn’t much of a sound track to the game itself. The silence kind of works for it giving the game a peaceful vibe. I played Tacoma on Linux. It never crashed and I didn’t notice any bugs. Performance was overall very good but there were a few times where it dropped into very low frame rates. Tacoma used a lot of VRAM and GPU usage which the graphical detail didn’t warrant. 9/10

Tacoma is about storytelling. It's a highly creative approach to how video games can be used to tell stories. No puzzles, no combat, no storyline branches. This game is intended to be peaceful and styled to fit all paces. Since it has a save & quit feature, you can take it in whatever chunks you want, although the whole story took me just under 4 hours. The space station Tacoma is beautifully rendered, and the story spools out at a very nice pace. There are a few easter eggs to hunt for as well, although the team did not load the achievements up into GOG for some reason. Make sure to hunt for missing letters and the kitty cat. Anyone who likes inventive storytelling or who is looking for a peaceful alternative to the normal run and gun frenetic game, this is for you. Closest in style to Edith Finch or Ethan Carter.

Like Gone Home, the story of Tacoma is actually middling. Not much surprises to be had, the plot can be seen from far away. The story also is fairly linear in how it's told, much like the previous game. The real star of the show is Fullbright's attention to characterization, telling the story and backstory of each character you see purely through investigation and connecting the dots. This was what made Gone Home's narrative technique interesting, and it applies to Tacoma as well. This is on top of the usage of a play-control type of scene reconstruction, where you as the investigator can see isolated, recorded scenes of the characters in the past and can pause, rewind, or fast-forward to get every detail you want out of a scene. You'll see how they interact with each other, how they deal in solitude, and what they do and read in these snapshots of time, even when characters are away from each other. The end result is not much different than if you were to play any game or read any story that focuses a lot on character details, but Tacoma makes for an interesting journey to get there. Truly, the satisfaction of the narrative is about the journey, not the end result. If you're a person who prefers to explore for details rather than having them handed to you, who prefers to intake the entirety of the narrative at your own pace, who likes to walk in a field rather than ride a rollercoaster, Tacoma (and by extension, Gone Home) can be an enjoyable pick for you. Otherwise, this might not be worth the experience.

I quite liked it; maybe because it's one of my first walking simulators, but i really enjoyed the atmosphere and uncovering the story (and multiple backstories) bit by bit, through a recording AR system that worked perfectly. The characters were interesting and the narrative, if a bit boilerplate, quite good for the runtime.