Tacoma (2017)

What a much better game than I expected it to be! I had a lot of fun with this game. More so than Fullbright’s last game “Gone Home”. Tacoma is filled with much more interesting human stories and just things to do. The story is captivating, if not a little confusing at the start. But once you kinda get the hang of what the game wants you to do (search the abandon ship and replay the logs to figure out what happened and piece them together chronologically) it becomes a very small cohesive piece of game storytelling. Highs, lows, heart racing moments, tragedy… it’s all there, and it is paced extremely well. Wandering an abandon empty space ship could be super boring, but Tacoma makes you care about characters you can’t really even see or interact with. You just watch. You basically become a passenger watching everything unfold around you. It takes everything Gone Home, Dear Esther and other “walking simulator” games have done and tell a really interesting and fun story.

I think most people took a look at this game and compared it to Gone Home and threw a fit because it didn’t feel the same. I found this game much more engaging than what Gone Home offered. Gone Home was built as a spook house, where you walked through the house in a certain order to go through the story. Tacoma feels a bit more linear in some aspects, but at the same time if feels more opened. I try to talk about the game as vaguely as possible so I don’t spoil the story, because even if you see the next story beat coming from a mile away, it's truly something that is genuinely entertaining and doesn’t feel ham fisted like Gone Home’s ending was. It’s a short sweet video game that doesn’t overstay its welcome and can be and should be finished in one sitting my advice and play this game, it’s worth it.