ECHOES OF THE PAST | 'Tacoma' Game Review
Alone on a spaceship with nothing to keep you company but memories and the secrets they have to share.
As Amy, you come aboard the space station Tacoma with an apparently simple mission: recover abandoned data created by the crew. The crew themselves are gone, but what remains tells a rich, engrossing story in which everyone's fighting their own battles.
In this sci-fi narrative built by the team at Fullbright, you play as an employee of a space-exploration corporation in 2088. The game is entirely story-driven, rather than puzzle or gameplay focussed, and your goal is simply to walk (and float) around the spaceship to collect as much of the remaining augmented reality data you can find; this data isn’t just information, however - it’s the moving, speaking imprints of the crew themselves. Virtual cats snooze on shelves, the radio plays through speakers overhead, and the crew go through the motions of everything from baking a cake to contemplating their own mortality. Free from the constraints of a linear timeline, ‘Tacoma’ shifts effortlessly from the mundane to the utterly life-changing, skipping back and forth but edging ever closer to the last recording the crew ever made. In collecting this information, you also discover what really happened aboard Tacoma and, most unsettlingly, why.
‘Tacoma’ is essentially a walking simulator. There are no enemies, no real choices to make, and the puzzles are virtually non existent. Even the NPCs aren’t there to be interacted with - they’re an echo, nothing more. What it lacks in gameplay, however it more than makes up for in style and storytelling. This game is like a novel you can reach out and touch. The graphics are rich, smooth and slightly retro, and the soundtrack is subtle but beautiful. It’s also an incredibly immersive experience, with outstanding voice acting, diverse, fully-realised characters, and a plot line that jogs briskly toward its brilliant conclusion.
If you already love narrative-driven adventure games like ‘Gone Home’ (which was built by the same team as ‘Tacoma’), ‘The Vanishing of Ethan Carter’ or ‘Firewatch’, you’ll be absolutely smitten with ‘Tacoma’. If you’ve never had the opportunity to play a walking sim before, or aren’t sure if you would enjoy it, give ‘Tacoma’ a shot; it’s the perfect introduction to an underrated genre.
Ready for spoilers? Check out the gameplay footage below. Please note: there is some coarse language in both the footage and the game.
You can purchase ‘Tacoma’ on Steam for USD$19.99 now!
Part 1
Part 2
