Tacoma | Chilled Out Game Review [REUPLOAD]
Welcome to Chilled-Out Game reviews, where I review my favourite games to unwind with. Tacoma is a narrative driven exploration game and a welcome shake up to the ‘walking simulator’ genre. The game opens as you arrive at the Tacoma Space Station. Something has taken place there and you need to investigate what has happened.
You do this by exploring the space station, examining items and watching recording of the crew. The way that Tacoma stands out from other similar games, or even the developers previous game ‘Gone Home’, is the presentation of these recordings. Each recording is a few minutes long, but is shown to you in augmented reality, placing the crew in the space around you.
You have full control of the playback and can pause, fast-forward and rewind to your heart’s content. It’s like watching a play, but you are up on the stage, walking amongst the actors, unseen. This is a fantastic new format for story-telling. It’s something that couldn’t be achieved in any other medium.
What makes Tacoma a brilliant experience isn’t just the concept of the recordings; the story is engaging and the characters are interesting, relatable and complex. For example, Very, very mild spoilers here, but when you explore Sareh’s office, you come across some anxiety medication.
She is the doctor so you may think little of it. Later on in the story you witness her having a panic attack. As an anxiety sufferer, this was a little difficult to watch and all I wanted to do was give her a hug. I really connected with all of the characters, especially Sareh, Nat and Bert.
Not forgetting the cat of course! I wouldn’t say that Tacoma has a particular art style, but it definitely has a sense of scale. Everytime you pass a window you can’t help but stop and stare out at the rest of the space station rotating past, or the Earth and Moon just hanging there in space.
I love the decision to only have artificial gravity in the rotating arms of the station. Moving around in Zero-G took a little while to get used to but once I did it was so much fun. I do really like the design of the AR representations of the crew. We get to see their faces in photographs around the station, but the characters themselves are very simple and surprisingly expressive I really love this game.
I was so invested in the story and found myself becoming more and more excited about the potential of narrative video games. This is a fantastic experience and although you will definitely get some 2001: A Space Odyssey vibes at the start, there are no jump scares or horror moments to worry about.
