ReviewGame review: Tacoma, by makers of Gone Home, takes voyeuristic storytelling into space
Sent to an abandoned space station on a recovery mission, players slowly unravel the mystery of the crew’s disappearance by finding and watching data left over by their augmented reality systems
Fullbright
4/5 stars
Four years ago developer The Fullbright Company (now just Fullbright) released Gone Home, a game about a young woman who returns from college to find her family’s home has been mysteriously vacated. At the time, the idea of a story-driven video game that contained no action sequences was still fairly audacious. Only a few games, The Stanley Parable (2011) and Dear Esther (2012) among them, had trodden a similar path and earned critical and commercial success.
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Yet unlike those games, which used existential shenanigans and literary language, respectively, to buttress their simple gameplay mechanics, Gone Home showed that voyeurism could also drive player engagement. Snooping through the family’s stuff is the main activity in that game and it is arguably more engrossing than solving its central mystery.
Tacoma (for PC and Xbox One), the new game from Fullbright, is set on a space station in 2088. Though the setting and context are vastly different from the 1990s household in Gone Home, the player’s journey is similarly tied to prying into other people’s lives. As such, the game domesticates the space adventure by making its characters and setting all-important.