Tacoma

Played Gone Home a while ago, found I really enjoy the genre of "open all the cabinets and find out what happened." Was really looking forward to this and it delivered - possibly one of my favorite games I've ever played. At least top 5. This game was released in 2017 and as I played it in early 2025... a lot of the future easter eggs are really hitting too close to home, sadly - the writers were spot-on in their predictions. Really interesting story, beautiful imagery. Kinda wish they'd make a VR version.

I tried this out on a friend's system, because it sounded like a game I might like -- and boy am I glad I did that, before spending any money on it!. OK, so leaving aside that the left stick (as it does in so many games) is hard-configured to strafe (which is absolutely ridiculous, in a 3D game), get this: + If you want to look up, hit D-Pad left + If you want to look down. hit D-Pad right + To turn left, push your right stick up + To turn right, push your right stick down So, for example, if you want to veer left while aiming upward, you need to use three fingers at once -- two of them making completely unintuitive movements. How the devs could get it so badly wrong, I don't know, but they ain't getting paid for it by me.

*Intro* This is a game in which you walk about a space station going through people's lives by looking at their computers, and where they lived and worked. You also play through several interactive scenes where past crew interactions are represented digitally where they took place. There is no combat or action or any form of threats. *Improvements* Obviously, comparisons to Gone Home are inevitable since it's the same developer and the games have similar gameplay. I'd say Tacoma is better in many ways: - The Augmented Reality bits are nicely done and make it easier to empathise with the crew. - The environment is more interesting, and it seems like a fairly realistic representation of what such a space station would be like. - The worldbuilding is nice, with space politics among space factions. Plus all the books, food, technology, etc. I criticised Gone Home for lazily re-using the same clothing texture in the same drawer but they really went the distance here. *Demerits* - It's harder to really feel for the crew because they're from the future and there's six of them. - It lacks the nostalgia of VHS tapes, cassette tapes, zines and 80s/90s bands. - The AR-bits would have been a lot better if they had actually shown people instead of wire-framed blobs. *Conclusion* Tacome is really well done and definitely one of the better 'walking simulators', but it didn't grab me as much as Gone Home did. Even though at 3 hours it's twice as long, you don't get to know the crew quite as well as the Samantha. Good but not great.

Fairly impressive walking simulator with some interesting ideas and even a plot. The story flow relies pretty heavily on characters that aren't that interesting and a lot of the actual exploration is moving objects and opening drawers and looking for a door code which gets very repetitive. At least there are no minigames or other shoehorned in things. Massive load time, though.

I liked more or less every aspect of it, but playing Tacoma was an incredibly short experience. I needed 2h 18min to finish it and I didn't rush. So my main gripe with it is that the asking price is too high for the content. This being said, Tacoma is a walking simulator with some mild game elements. The main element is replaying "Augmented Reality" (AR) recordings of the crew and typically stepping in when a crew member opens his/her own AR interface to investigate the communication. There are also a few key codes to be found by searching some quarters and offices. The whole handling of these AR elements is really nicely done. There are very few games that managed to deliver such a plausible interface in a SciFi game. Besides, the concept of displaying people as abstracted AR constructs is actually a very clever way to bring animated characters into a budget walking simulator. There are no enemies, there is no time pressure, I really liked the gaming mechanism a lot. My only complaint would be that you can't really explore freely but proceed from section to section which also makes the game even easier as the area to search for hints etc. is rather small. While the graphics are not top notch and there is nothing really spectacular about the world (well, station) design either, Tacoma looks pretty good most of the time and the station feels somewhat believable. There are lots of objects which you can investigate or throw around in zero gravity and lots of background info on the crew. Also voice acting is very good. The story is interesting but feels very rushed towards the end. Actually, while I enjoyed the two hours I played it, the end really felt like money was running out so they needed to cut out three chapters that were originally planned. So with something like 8h, I would have given it a better rating, but really, 2h is much too short.