Tacoma

If it feels like I was playing a similar game at around the same time last year, it's because I was. Tacoma reminds me in several ways of The Turing Test, another first-person adventure game where you also explore an abandoned facility in space and gather clues by exploring your surroundings. Both games feature an AI, though in different capacities. Whereas in The Turing Test an AI accompanies you throughout your journey, in Tacoma you explore your surroundings via augmented reality (AR) and see the crew's interactions with each other as well as the onboard AI, ODIN, at different times before the accident. It's a really creative way through which to build the narrative and you'll soon find yourself tracking the different crew members to find out what they were up to in the hours or days leading up to the accident. In a way, it feels like you're solving a murder mystery, piecing together the clues to reveal the villain at the heart of it all. Unlike The Turing Test however, and save for a few codes you can find to open lockers, there are no puzzles to solve in Tacoma, no obstacles to stop you from advancing the narrative other than the aforementioned events' reconstruction. This does make for a rather short experience, clocking at around 3 hours going by GOG Galaxy's records. Still, if you're looking for a purely story-driven experience, Tacoma might be the thing for you, managing to create a suspenseful atmosphere that will urge you to figure out what happened to the crew of Tacoma and what your purpose aboard the station is. Having said that, its asking price of $19.99* is probably a little on the steep side for such a short adventure. Recommended at a discount. *In the interest of full disclosure, I paid $11.39 due to regional pricing.

Fullbright's successor to Gone Home succeeds not by rehashing Gone Home's intimate and personal storytelling, but by expanding the voyeuristic environmental storytelling into a wider cast of engaging characters. A journey that explores compelling, charming characters culminates with a thrilling ending and leaves you with a sense of triumph more than Gone Home's passive discoveries. Make no mistake, Tacoma is still the same genre of gameplay, you won't be affecting the outcomes with decisions, but your explorations of the spaces and texts and dialog feel more alive with this game's more active interactions. And while this is no headscratching puzzler, some mild keycodes and locks to find keys for do help round out the exploratory feel of the space station Tacoma. And the art of the game is a step up from its predecessor, with the little details that made Gone Home so charming magnified into a hundred more. If you liked Gone Home, you'll like Tacoma. Like it's predecessor, Tacoma is not a long game, but don't let that dissuade you from enjoying its storytelling. Take a few hours, explore this space station and what it tells you about its previous occupants and their lives and the world they live in, it's well worth your while, I promise. And don't forget to find all the space cats!

It´s a nice violence-less game with pretty good storytelling, but it should be kept in mind that it´s a one evening experience, replayability is minimal and with thorough exploration, it takes not much longer than 4 hours to reach the end. Interaction options with the world are thin, but I liked the story and the characters as well, so on a sale, when you can grab it at the price of a cinema ticket, I'd definitely choose this game over a movie.

It's an interesting story with a few twists. The company that owns and runs the station you're sent to investigate is flamboyantly evil, and everyone is gay. Seriously, the writers seem to have been slightly obsessed with making their characters homosexual, as if that is the future of the human race. Make of that what you will; it feels like a very tacked-on element to the story, sort of a "how can I make this more about me?" kind of decision rather than something a serious writer would do.

Buy it. This is Memento crossed with Moon, as an interactive experience. I got this game as part of Twitch Prime. It'd been on my wishlist for a while, but other things always came up first. Man, do I regret that now. Cons first: * It's short. 3-4 hours is not uncommon. * The zero-g bits are a little cumbersome to navigate without proper up/down controls * You can only hold one item at a time. The game design obviously works around that, but it felt clumsy, and there were a few times where I threw an item I needed onto the floor instead of opening a door on the way to where the item needed to be used. Nevertheless, for something that is in spirit and old-school adventure game, this felt awkward as hell. Pros: * The writing is generally quite good * I love, love, love the conceit of exploring recordings of crew in different parts of the ship at the same time. * I felt like I got to know the characters involved really well. * I had a ton of fun watching things unfold. tl;dr -- buy it. It's good. It's fun. It's an old-fashioned adventure game in first person, set in space. What more could you want?