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.
I love a good story based game and this is another I'll add to my list of recommendable favourites.
The crew are great to get to know & it was exciting to get to understand what happened.
The game looks great, the rewinding mechanic made me engage with extracting all the info by listening / somewhat voyeristically experiencing all the conversations.
Played through in BigScreen VR too, which was a treat!
Recommend in particular if you're into linear narrative adventures that don't overstay their welcome.
Great representation too, of all sorts, quirky AI included ;-)
This is an adventure walking simulator.
I enjoyed playing the Augmented Reality recordings to follow the story. Voice acting is well done, aside from Odin, which IMO is far from a computer voice. Animations and movements are good. Settings is terrestrial everyday life on a space station, including trash everywhere.
Story is too much on the goodies side, you may grow fond of the charactes but you don't get to choose sides as they are all ncie people manipulated by an evil comporation.
Nice novel, too short, deserves a playthrough.
Tacoma's plot is perhaps lower on the list of priorities than other tasks. The plot is certainly there, and is actually more fleshed out than the previous game by Fullbright, Gone Home, but it's also more of a framework for the story to dip into other areas.
The places where the game really gazes intently at its subject is in the interpersonal connection of characters in a world with tough choices and a lingering danger. One telling scene early on depicts a character asking the on-ship medic about the dangers of space life, as if he didn't really know the total risks of what he signed on for. His reactions to the events that follow is in-line with this sudden realization that space life isn't just about the deafening isolation.
The writing has pockets of focus into the mechanics of space life (not very different from most sci-fi - don't expect novel science ideas here) but each character embraces their own mortality in a multitude of ways. There is an scene of a man and a woman, hugging as they contemplate the most difficult decision of their lives, as the space ship turns around them. If that is what you sign up for in sci-fi, this is the game for you. It's not earth shattering, it's not a thriller or an exciting mystery. It's a slice of life experience that increases in intensity, but the general vibe remains low-key.
There's also plentiful worldbuilding, depicting mega-corporations, morality of AI, and new political concerns.. This is also a different social politics world - half the cast is LGBT, and the characters' race is blended to reflect a multicultural future. Star Trek is a citation here.
I have reservations about the game. I think the technology and graphics are a weak point. There were not many developers on the team and I can conprehend the drawbacks involved. Animations are great, for example. But the general aesthetic of the game feels empty, almost unpolished, and poor for the computer needed to play it.
From the makers of Gone Home comes a walking simulator where you listen to/watch recordings of a DIVERSE! cast of characters. How you feel about that depends on how you feel about games like Gone Home. If you think they're a blight upon the world of gaming, this is definitely not "made for you." If you like this sort of thing, it's fine. Be aware that, as others say, it's a "fancy visual novel."
I got into this expecting a cool exploration of a weird sci-fi world with some puzzles and exploration, and it did not live up to my expectations. This concerns itself far more with relationships. That said, there are some genuinely interesting ideas here. It's sci-fi, but it's more "The Martian" than "Star Trek." It's pretty down to earth and impressively accurate.
I got it on sale and HOLY CRAP I would not buy it for $20. $5, maybe $10, seems a better price.
