Tacoma

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!

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.

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.

This game has an amazing story, and tells it in such a unique and interesting way! It's more of an audiovisual experience than a game, and is like a good book that you can't put down. I love it! Also supports Linux, so great job on that devs. :)

Tacoma is a game that really shines when you take your time to inspect and appreciate the environments of the station. From the very first moments in you will encounter seemingly mundane props which you can grab and examine and I highly recommend checking them out. To my delight I encountered an item in the kitchen which resonated strongly with me, individual packets of Irish breakfast tea. Exploring the food items aboard the station was surprisingly an iconic moment for me, but the real interest were the two sci-fi aspects. First the station itself, every bit of which feels very personal. The environments are pleasant for human habitation and enjoyable to interact with, a luxurious evolution from our own humble ISS. One could imagine this being a comfortable home for the duration of their stay there. Second, and for what I would really recommend Tacoma for- the involvement of AI in the story. For those who are fans of Asimov, or robot philosophy in general this is a sparkling gem. Witnessing the interactions between the crew and their AI, coming to understand their relationship- it's a wonderful experience. Those who are invasive snoopers might also come to appreciate or resent the characters present. Carefully ransacking their quarters and their offices I found myself becoming invested in the outcome of the story. I wanted their plan to work, for them to make it home safely. I can say that the game is not for those interested in puzzles or other gameplay features, or those who don't find simple observation enjoyable. This is a game for the introvert, watching the situation from the outside. It is something to immerse yourself in, to catch a glimpse of some possible future and how it relates to our current world. From start to finish the pacing was excellent, the ending satisfying, feeling like it truly had meaning- that here was taking place a piece of virtual history, right in the making, with dark implications looming in the distance. Try find the hen.