Tacoma (Xbox One)

With their game Gone Home, Fullbright helped propel narrative exploration into the mainstream, and while it also lead to that genre’s sneering “walking simulator” moniker gaining ground in the gaming public, it helped draw more attention to a niche genre that was only just starting to learn its potential. Naturally, whatever game Fullbright made next would have plenty of attention on it, and when they switched from Gone Home’s grounded family home setting to Tacoma’s science fiction space station, it was clear they weren’t just trying to reproduce their big hit.

 

Tacoma is a narrative exploration game as well, this particular tale involving a woman named Amy Ferrier arriving at the Tacoma space station, an orbital station used to transfer cargo between Earth and its moon. Amy finds the station a mess, the people meant to run it missing and the AI in charge of it, ODIN, on the fritz. The player’s goal at the outset is just to collect the hardware that ODIN’s AI is contained in, and multiple steps of the process involve data downloads that gave Amy time to wander off and explore the different regions of the space station. Gradually, you begin to uncover information on the six people who were aboard Tacoma, learning not only about the situation that left the space station in disarray, but uncovering hidden mysteries and learning more about the people who got roped up in these dire straits.

 

While Tacoma does include many of the narrative exploration staples of wandering around and looking at objects or notes to learn more about the world you’re in and the characters important to the narrative, it also introduces a far more interactive means of getting information that still doesn’t remove the relaxed focus of learning things at your own pace. Entering certain areas of the space station will cause data signatures left behind by the old crew to appear via augmented reality, Amy able to view brief reconstructions of key points in the story of the six unfortunate crew members. Fairly early we learn that the space station was in danger and the crew begins to start reacting to it in their own ways, panicking, working together, fretting for their future, and reflecting on their past. Despite seeing these moments unfold in front of you, the individuals involved are recorded more as colored digitized forms with no clear features that go through the motions the humans once did. This isn’t just a stylistic choice though, as this is a computer recording that you can fast forward, pause, and rewind. Amy is able to literally follow the characters to pursue different narrative threads, peer in on the screens of their futuristic devices to learn what they’re looking into, and uncover codes or passwords that help her open doors and safes with other interesting details about the characters. There are moments of digital corruption meant to smooth over areas that would otherwise provide pointless information, including corrupting documents so only the pertinent info is presented or a certain mystery is maintained by the data being glitched, but there’s still plenty to chew on and opportunities to learn about the crew as you walk through a moment in their lives.

Despite being presented only as the simple human shapes, each of the six characters and ODIN as well are given an incredible amount of depth, partly because you can follow each person’s thread during each different digital reproduction of a moment. Even though you never see their faces on their bodies, you do find pictures of them, and while you will see them moving around the environment in their simplified form, it’s fairly easy to slot into your memory how they would have actually looked during these moments. The interpersonal relationships, histories, fears, and more all are given space to be explored because you take the reins in how you experience it. You can enter the character’s room and rummage around, you can read their digital displays to find messages they sent and records of things they were looking into, and its very easy to sympathize with the crew and start to worry about their well-being as you push deeper into the space station itself and get closer and closer to learning where the crew might be in the present.

 

Since so much of the game is dependent on you watching the characters react to the situation, it’s important they be as developed as they are. Even well after playing the game I can still tell you about the botanist Andrew’s home life, his concerns about living in space, his hope for his adopted son, and his character arc as he comes to grips with the danger Tacoma is in. I can remember the intriguing history of the medic Sareh Hasmady and how her history has parallels to the situation she finds herself in aboard the Tacoma. I remember being delighted to learn about the awkward but jovial operation specialist Clive managing to develop a romance with E.V. and worrying as they may have put off their love too long, and I can recall the relationship between engineer Bert and her girlfriend Natali providing a more consistent degree of levity than the others even though they too have serious concerns and other characters sometimes have their own funny moments.

 

Tailing the cast’s digital signatures and seeing how they play off each other is an incredibly effective way of making the narrative exploration more dynamic, but ODIN does feel like he’s the odd one out. As the station’s AI he is less emotional and mostly acts as a program with a layer of personality placed over it might, but he’s not absolutely dry despite being understandably robotic at times. His voice actor does excellent work as do the rest of the core cast, selling their emotions even at their most heightened levels. ODIN is perhaps better as a voice other characters can bounce off of in a unique way, although since his recovery is technically the main goal of the story, he does have a few hidden depths himself.

Tacoma’s futuristic world is certainly an interesting setting, both far enough in the future that we can more easily engage in space travel but still featuring recognizable items and even company names. The Carnival Cruise company has important ties to Clive, and Amazon unsurprisingly is still around 60 years in the future and has ascended to be one of the megacorporations that influence future life. However, despite being a few generations ahead of where we are now, you can notice small things like one member of the crew having a more old-fashioned toothbrush despite another seemingly have one designed to clean an entire row of teeth all at once. The bathrooms, food containers, and other products all seem to have been adjusted reasonably for life in space, although the shallow spoons perhaps lean more into aesthetic than believable utility. The fact that many things have advanced but the past still lingers certainly feels closer to how time will change us in real life, so seeing this reflected in a science fiction vision of the future is rather nice. Even though Earth’s countries have perhaps undergone a rather silly level of division and reinvention, you can still find magazines in the same year people are also pulling up screens in the air thanks to augmented reality systems. Rooting around in even the less important areas of Tacoma help the world come together well before its nature truly becomes relevant to the plot, and perhaps unsurprisingly, the relationship between people and companies becomes a key concept that you explore. The fact that loyalty points for working under companies has become a form of accepted currency is just one believable bit of exaggeration that helps prepare you for how the shape of society influences what happened aboard the Tacoma space station.

 

The fact you only ever interact with most of the core cast by watching them through augmented reality reproductions does mean near the end of the game you aren’t quite given a resolution that will satisfy your desire to know their full fate. That isn’t to say the game’s ending is bad, and it even ratchets up the tension as you close in on the finale even though you’re never really in danger yourself, but knowing that you’ll soon find out why you couldn’t find a single crew member aboard really helps those final digital memories feel tense. It’s hard to think of a proper ending or epilogue that could cleanly incorporate the AR memories or free form environmental exploration, so satisfying the remaining questions is perhaps better left to the imagination and reasonable inferences rather than delivering weak wrap-ups to the personal narratives. Tacoma tells the part of the story it shares with you in an interesting and unique way, so it’s better to keep that package clean and consistent to ensure its emotional beats hit home and the player is never pulled out of the immersive experience.

THE VERDICT: Tacoma is a strong step forward from the creators of Gone Home. Exploring the space station for more pieces of the story isn’t just about finding notes, augmented reality revealing voiced digital reproductions of key moments that carry more impact since you get to step into and relive these key scenes. The future depicted is fleshed out through things you find by searching around, and the crew becomes fleshed out and sympathetic as you view their interactions and root through their belongings and old messages. The character drama is Tacoma’s strongest point with the corporate commentary and societal development tying things together into a story that justifies its futuristic setting while still providing a very human look at a compelling story. It hits the right marks for narrative exploration, and if the plot points had a bit more punch or pulled harder at your heartstrings, it could have gone from excellent to truly superb.

 

And so, I give Tacoma for Xbox One…

A GREAT rating. Clive, E.V., Andrew, Sareh, Bert, and Natali are all excellent human characters despite the player only ever meeting them through photos or as featureless beings made of colored data. Tacoma’s story hinges on building these characters up through their habits, histories, and personalities, and since you tackle the memories in a fairly linear progression, you’re also becoming more attached to the crew as their situation grows more dire. Perhaps the major reason that Tacoma doesn’t rank higher is that it builds up all this sympathy for the crew, lays down opportunities for interpersonal drama, and doesn’t deliver on a lot of the questions you’d want answered about these characters save for how the main plot thread is resolved. You aren’t left confused or feeling hollow, but there’s so many stories that will undergo interesting developments due to the events of the plot and it’s a shame you have to leave Tacoma without being able to truly see the impact. You can definitely make reasonable assumptions about many of them and the game does tie up some of the threads that would be agonizing to leave loose, so all that time you spent learning about the crew through their living space does pay off well. It’s definitely hard to truly predict the face of humanity’s future as well but Fullbright still did a good job of feeling rather realistic in its guesses rather than plunging into the overambitious kind of sci-fi that doesn’t suit this surprisingly grounded narrative about six humans struggling with a dire situation.

 

Gone Home may always hold the bigger point in history, but Tacoma’s certainly the more creative and immersive experience. It’s built better to tell its story and does so in a more interesting manner than picking up note after note, and a lot of love was definitely put into both constructing a reasonable future and filling the space station with details that flesh out its compelling cast with small but meaningful details. Narrative exploration hinges a lot on how you uncover that story as you wander around the environment, and Tacoma nails that aspect, only really needing a bit more punch in the actual plot line to achieve even greater excellence.