A Richly Layered Story Experience: Six crewmembers lived and worked on space station Tacoma, forming relationships, experiencing love and loss, and facing crisis together. Discover not just what happened to these people, but what makes them who they are, through your role as an interactive investigator. The story is told through a series of fully voiced and animated interactive AR scenes, immersing you in the events on Tacoma.
A Groundbreaking Multi-Path Story System: In each section of the station, you are surrounded by digital representations of crewmembers following their own parallel story threads that diverge, recombine, and split off again. Rewind, fast-forward, and move through these scenes' chronologies as they swirl around you. Your interactive tools allow you to discover the tightly-knotted narrative from every angle, and in every detail.
A Deeply Interactive Gameworld: Explore Tacoma Station both physically and digitally. Unlock doors and drawers to find meaningful objects, notes, and physical artifacts, while simultaneously exploring extensive records of the crew's digital communications and personal thoughts. Every facet of the crew's experience on Tacoma is part of your investigation.
A Vision of the Future: Experience life in the year 2088. Discover a rich fictional universe that depicts humanity's expansion into low-Earth orbit and beyond. A deeply-imagined speculative vision of the near future from the award-winning story team behind Gone Home and BioShock 2: Minerva's Den.
A Compact Narrative Experience: Tacoma is estimated to take around 2 to 5 hours to complete. How deep you dig and how much detail you find is up to you. Tacoma is a non-combat, non-puzzle-focused game. The details of the story and gameworld are there for you to discover at your own pace.
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.
I'm not particularly fond of this game. First, because it's not much of a "game": sure you have to walk through the entire station and discover some access codes but your agency is zero point zero. You can't change absolutely anything about your gameplay, be it the outcome of your exploration or otherwise. You're strictly in an on-rails experience you can't do anything about. I, for one, find that severely grating. Even if the ultimate fate of the station crew is out of my hands (for which there is no good reason it would HAVE to be), there should be SOMETHING I get to decide - but no, this is not that kind of "game".
Second, this thing is short as hell. Honestly, I didn't expect to complete it in a single session, but I sure did, considering it's a mere 3-4 hours long, even if you take your time. That might be adequate for a Disney ride but not so much for something sold as a game.
Third, there seems to be an obvious attempt to make you care about the crew, by going through their personal mail etc. - unfortunately, it kinda fails due to you simply not getting all that much time to spend with any of them. There's only so much familiarity you can get by ransacking their sleeping quarters exactly once or recovering their "AR records", and it's not really enough to forge a bond.
In the end, it turns out modeling a (smallish) space station and dropping a bunch of personal lore here and there a compelling game does not make. It's up to you, make up your own mind...
*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.
