Five years ago I played Gone Home and ended my post about it by wishing that it had people you could actually interact with. Tacoma is of course the next game by the same developer, Fullbright, and while you still can’t interact with the characters in it, you can watch them interact with one another. It’s a rather neat solution to filling a space to explore with more things than just notes and photographs.

Set in the future, the player is a subcontractor who has been assigned to travel to a space station by an employer and retrieve data from it. The station is empty but you have augmented reality implants that allow you to watch recorded scenes of the six crew members as well as the station’s resident AI named ODIN interact with one another. These recordings are supplemented by communications logs, various files and notes etc. to let you reconstruct what happened. The basic premise that the crew members have all just had their contracts renewed for another and were celebrating an event called Obsolescence Day when a meteor shower seemed to have struck the station. Their oxygen supply was reduced to a matter of days and the exterior communications systems were damaged, preventing them from being able to call for help. This forced most of the crew to enter cryogenic hibernation while two of their engineers tried to jury-rig a way to save all of their lives.

Naturally there’s more to the story but it’s not very complicated, and as I’ve plenty of experience with science-fiction stories, I managed to guess most of it fairly early on. Each of the characters have of course their own back stories with the doctor in particular having a previous scandal on her record. Most of it is pretty normal stuff however and I didn’t have much of an emotional reaction to the storytelling as I did in the previous game. I did however like the worldbuilding. Part of the background here is that the space stations are perfectly capable of being automatically run by the AI but workers’ unions on Earth agitated to make it mandatory for them to be crewed to preserve jobs. It’s an interesting wrinkle that’s pretty cool.

As before, there’s no real difficulty as figuring out the passcodes and such is dirt easy. Getting all of the achievements however is quite difficult without looking them up online as some are rather obscure but it’s just silly thing for completionists to waste time on anyway. My favorite part of the game was exploring the station itself, how everything is logically laid out and all of the objects in it. You can pick up and examine almost every object in the game, from pencils to discarded beverage cans, and all of it is wonderfully detailed. There are in-universe appropriate advertisements, ingredients of foodstuffs, instructions for medicines. I love all of the worldbuilding and detail.

I do feel that this still hews too closely with they’ve already done with Gone Home, especially with an ending that is very similar in tone. All six of the characters are pleasant, nice people. Throughout all of the recorded scenes that you have access to, you never see them get into an argument with each other. It’s all very drama-free. Plus in the end, I think the game is too short and the story too straightforward and simple. I love the station itself but the narrative bits are too thin to feel very satisfying. Overall it’s an okay experience but I don’t think I would be interested in more of the same.