Posted on: October 17, 2017

Audiocide

Games: 425 Reviews: 2

Perfectly functional on non-Ubuntu.

First of all, this game is a delightful experience. Fantastic storytelling and atmosphere. As someone who gets bored within a half hour, with ~9 out of 10 videogames I play these days, I have found Tacoma geniunely enjoyable throughout. As an aside, a great big thanks t Fullbright for a perfectly functional GNU/Linux port, and for demonstrating, in undeniable terms, that it is indeed possible to create a Unity game that works on more than one single distribution. Also for rebindable controls, which is a big deal for us lefties. I wonder if Mr. Ryan Gordon was involved here? At any rate, I recommend this to anyone who enjoys story driven, atmospheric, or space themed adventure games.

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Posted on: February 21, 2018

kdgog

Verified owner

Games: Reviews: 67

I really enjoyed it

Great story, great voice acting. There were two other features I liked. It is not too long (I hate games that overstay their welcome), and I could explore as if I was really there which increased my immersion. Also nothing got in the way of that experience: no deaths and reloading, no puzzles that got me stuck. It was just a really enjoyable time exploring a space station and connecting the dots in the story. Don't play it expecting terror, violence, guns, danger, brain-bending puzzles, or you'll be disappointed. But if you want to explore a place and piece together a story then you'll really enjoy this. Excellent stuff. My only minor issue is that some bits of the interface were confusing (some emails had attachments I couldn't open; some things seemed to be audiologs I couldn't play; other parts were locked or corrupted and I assumed I had to do something to unlock them). I _think_ it turns out none of those things are as I thought, and they aren't in the game. It was just my UI expectations being thrown a bit.

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Posted on: July 9, 2018

calmcdonald

Verified owner

Games: 59 Reviews: 8

Narrative Exploration at its greatest

Tacoma, the follow-up game by Fullbright, the maker's of Gone Home, is a short sci-fi novella that pushes the genre of narrative exploration games and its standard to new heights. In Tacoma you are a freelance contractor send to the space station Tacoma to retrieve its AI core, all the while learning about what happened to its crew and how they faced a life-threatening catastrophe and its true cause. The game's main mechanic allows to see past conversations being played out in front of you in real time through an augmented reality system that records everything on the station. It enables you to see how conversations unfold, rewind them to find hints and follow it where it branches off for more information. It is a simple yet brilliant mechanic that immerses you into the plot and lets you see both its intimate characertisations of the diverse cast as well as hint at its grander themes of world building, such as the costs of privatising the exploration of space or what ethical problems arise with the treatment of AIs once they reach sentience. All this thrives due to the excellent, smart and subtle writing as well as the even more brilliant performances of its actors. The latter cannot be stressed enough when acting in video games too often is fraught with stereotypes and shallow ideas. The only short coming of Tacoma is that its final story arch is a bit rushed and falls short on developing the tremendous tension that Gone Home had for example. However, what Tacoma ultimately left me with was a wish to be able to spend more time in its world and the belief that video games can actually develop true literary value!

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Posted on: January 18, 2018

Shantih1

Verified owner

Games: Reviews: 17

Utterly engaging narrative fiction

Whereas Gone Home's arrival challenged a lot of preconceptions about what interactive fiction could look like - Tacoma enters a marketplace where many games have been experimenting with the format. It's a credit to the design team at Fullbright that Tacoma innovates - although a lot of the experience ties close to that created in Gone Home. Tacoma looks like it won't rely on comfortable nostalgia. But there is a lot of the same Gone Home aesthetic on this space station. There are still cups, clothes, hair bands, packaged food and scraps of paper in the trash. Similarly, Tacoma leans into genre tropes to build an atmosphere. Gone Home used horror and suspense to create a sense of unease, while Tacoma uses 1970s sci-fi tropes to drive player assumptions. There's a crew of working class individuals - and an ambiguous AI - operating in sterile spaces which they have personalised. Gone Home's intensely personal story was a surprise to be discovered underneath its tropes - whereas Tacoma's is front and centre from the beginning because the narrative is a more straightforward sci-fi yarn. Where Tacoma really innovates is in its central mechanic of Artificial Reality. It’s so intuitive to understand how to pause, rewind and scrub through AR records of past events while simultaneously hacking heads up displays to provide additional information on the crew and their story. The AR interface provides the same feeling of truly being a detective in an unfamiliar space as players felt in Gone Home - but with the added bonus of filling the location with life and conversation as well as a collection of abandoned artifacts. Whereas in Gone Home it was discovering the threads of a story which kept me delving further, in Tacoma it's the fluidity of the mechanics which engaged me. Ultimately I was less moved by the story this time around, but I was no less engaged by the experience of entering an unfamiliar space and feeling like my actions helped me to understand it.

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Posted on: April 22, 2018

Zoidberg

Verified owner

Games: 770 Reviews: 47

Very nice Scfi Walking Sim

As in the title. I wholeheartedly enjoyed the journey on the Tacoma station. Very well written characters and voicing if I may say so. If Gone Home had piqued your interest and you liked it but you yearned for "a bit more" and that you like scifi, my bet is that you'll like this one at least as much. Although this one is a bit more linear. Very good Scifi Walking Sim along the lines of Soma and Event[0], in slightly different implementations.

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