Game Details
- Publisher: Fullbright
- Developer: Fullbright
- ESRB Rating: “T” for Teen
- Genre: Narrative Driven Adventure
- Pros: Neat storytelling style; fantastic end reveal(s)
- Cons: Short; boring; performance issues
- MSRP: $20
You play as Amy Ferrier, a subcontractor sent to the Tacoma
space station to investigate an accident and recover A.I. data and hardware.
The six-person crew is gone but key moments of their lives – particularly over
the last few days – are available as augmented reality recordings. As in every
walking simulator, learning about the individual crewmembers and their
relationships is as much the draw here as learning about the accident aboard
the station. Watching the AR recordings, reading their conversation logs, and
checking out their personal living quarters all help turn the crew –
represented as brightly colored polygonal projections – into real living,
breathing, relatable people.
Gameplay takes place in the first-person-perspective where
you (sigh) walk around and look at stuff and activate conversations. Tacoma
makes things slightly more interesting since the conversations are actually
augmented reality recordings. The AR recordings of the crew cover an entire
area of the station so you might have to follow people around to get the full
details of a conversation or even play through a recording multiple times since
multiple conversations can be taking place in different rooms all at the same
time. You can freely rewind and fast forward through scenes as well as pause
them so you can peep through a person’s data when they have it open at that
moment during a scene.
The core idea is that you have to collect 100% of that vital
data in each area of the station in order to move on to the next. Vital
conversations are marked on the timeline of each scene, so figuring out who you
should be following and paying attention to is easy. You don’t actually have to
listen to every conversation or look at every log / etc. to make progress, but
being thorough in your exploration and attentive in your observation helps
flesh out the characters.
The various scenes take you through the planning stages of a
party, an accident where the station suddenly loses oxygen, the desperate
struggle to come up with an escape plan and, ultimately, the discovery of what
was behind the accident in the first place. Piecing together the lives of the
crew before and during the event is fascinating. I can’t help but feel it is
overly brief, however, as it only takes a couple of hours to play through
Tacoma. Just when you’re barely getting to know the characters and figure out
the situation the credits are already rolling. Gone Home felt like you went
through a complete journey as you explored the house. Tacoma just sort of hits
a climax and immediately ends.
I feel like Tacoma needed more to do, too. Coming back to a
straightforward “watch conversations”-style walking simulator after playing
more active and player involved narrative driven adventures like What Remainsof Edith Finch, Journey, ABZU, RiME, and Firewatch is pretty disappointing.
Scouring over every note of paper or e-mail or book on a shelf in order to
scrape together enough story that you give a crap about the characters isn’t
nearly as interesting as giving you actual gameplay that makes you an engaged
participant in the story rather than just an observer. Tacoma is still very
enjoyable, don’t get me wrong, but isn’t especially “fun” the way the genre has
shown it can be.
There are also some performance issues on the Xbox One
version of Tacoma that need to be addressed. Many players, including me,
experienced the game getting stuck on the menu screen when you first start the
game. A hard reset of the Xbox fixed this, but it is still annoying. The game
also has frequent framerate issues where the game will noticeably chug along
even when seemingly nothing is going on. The worst drops occur during
transition scenes where the game is loading in the next area, so it is sort of
understandable, but the framerate is unstable during regular gameplay, too,
which isn’t as easy to ignore.
Presentation overall in Tacoma is fantastic. The visuals are
sharp and clean and the little details, particularly in the personal quarters
of the crew, are very well done. Something that I noticed is that even though
there are windows all over the place, most of them are just looking at the
structure of the station rather than a nice view of outer space (though other
areas did have better views). This was an interesting detail that helped me
imagine the psychological toll of working on the station as much or more than
any of the personal diaries did, which I really appreciated. Sound-wise Tacoma
is excellent with unanimously great voice work for the crew and an unexpectedly
great soundtrack that consists of more than just futuristic techno like most
sci-fi games use.
In the end, Tacoma is easily a better game than Gone Home
and a solid walking simulator overall. Good presentation, solid story, and a
neat storytelling method go a long way here, but the brevity and lack of real
meat in terms of interactivity set it back a bit compared to other recent
entries in the genre. It won’t do much to sway the opinions of folks that don’t
like narrative driven adventures, but for fans of the genre Tacoma is another good one and well worth a look.
Disclosure: A review code was provided by the publisher.
