Tacoma

Tacoma is well made for what it sets out to do. Unlike Gone Home, which leaned heavily on mystery, Tacoma focuses more on the people aboard the space station, slowly building toward a reveal about the corporation behind it all. The world building and characters are honestly more compelling than the main plot its biggest weakness is that the story holding everything together feels a bit underwritten. It’s a low stakes, very guided experience, and I can see why some players might lose interest early on. But the AR segments are absolutely the highlight. The amount of effort it must’ve taken to script and perform every overlapping conversation so cleanly is wild, and as a mechanic it’s far more engaging than the letters and audio logs from Gone Home. Choosing which threads to follow makes the story feel more alive. Basically, everything Gone Home did well, Tacoma improves on except for the core narrative, which feels almost incidental even though it fits with the world it builds. Still, if you enjoy walking sims, Tacoma is an easy recommendation as “another one of those,” and a well-crafted one at that.

This game feels very surreal in our current political climate (2025). Please everyone, remember we're all human. Take care of one another. Stand up for one another. Don't let corps take advantage of you!

A short yet sweet story driven game set on an orbital space station. You unravel the story and get to know the 6 inhabitants by exploration and Augmented Reality. If you like gentle story games that are well crafted and pleasing to play then this will suit you.

A short walking story game set in space, very low stakes and chill to play through. Wish it was longer, but still good nevertheless!

This is a wonderful game and I hugely enjoyed playing it. It's rich with atmosphere, and an exciting story and mystery slowly unravels as you learn about the characters involved, their histories, and their motivations as you explore. It's a relaxed experience, allowing you to focus on exploration and narrative. If this sounds like your cup of tea, as it was most definitely mine, then I highly recommend it.

An interesting game to play in our current technological climate. I can't say I outwardly disagree with any of the ideas posed in this game, but the position taken is a seemingly dated one. Either that or this entire thing flew way over my head.
There is also the caveat that I have very mixed feelings about the way the player interacts with the game itself. I had very little agency in anything that happened and my personal curiosity and interest were never met with any kind of response. That isn't overtly negative as I think the idea is you as the employee are an onlooker, but it would have been cool to have a little more happen in response to my active participation in all the little dots being connected.
By engaging with the gameplay mechanics like viewing chat logs and work station messages I learned things and then that was it. This game took me about 3 hours to beat because I really wanted to look into all that I could with the hope that the game would reward me in some way. Instead I just kind of learned more about the characters, but much of it had little to do with the plot.
I hope to play through this once or twice more because I feel like there is some bigger idea I'm not picking up on.
I say all this, but the game is still spectacular. Coming from the studio that made Gone Home this is a very decent and competent walking sim that surely any fan of the previous game would enjoy.

Atmospheric similar to Firewatch, mystery, but low stakes as it is mostly an exploring and following the story. Fairly short play as well, but I enjoyed it.