Tacoma
Tacoma is a narrative adventure set aboard a high-tech space station in the year 2088. As you go about your mission, you’ll explore every detail of how the station’s crew lived and worked, finding the clues that add up to a gripping story of trust, fear, and resolve in the face of disaster. At the heart of Tacoma is the facility’s digital surveillance system, which has captured 3D recordings of pivotal moments in the crew’s life on the station. As you explore, echoes of these captured moments surround you. You’ll use your ability to rewind, fast-forward, and move through the physical space of these complex, interwoven scenes to examine events from every angle, reconstructing the multi-layered narrative as you explore. Tacoma is the next game from the creators of Gone Home, and carries on that tradition of detailed, immersive, and powerful storytelling, while pulling players deeper into the narrative than ever before.
Game Discussion
Steam User 16
It's a pretty great shot story. The premise is simple yet interesting enough, something happened on a space station, and you are sent there to recover the information aboard and retrieve the station's AI hard drive. While you do that, you explore every inch of the station, take a look at how the lives of the crew were onboard through AR recordings, and discover what happened and how it all went down.
Almost all small objects in the game are inspectable and are pretty nicely detailed making it a pleasure to just take random objects in your hand and look at them seeing how the devs imagined common objects would look like in 70 years, aboard a space station.
Although all the game is about is exploring the station, it's still pretty engaging and immersive in the story, it is aesthetically pleasing and short enough to not get boring. I'd say it could've even used at least one more hour of gameplay. At a normal pace, you should be done with the game in no more than 4 hours, including any missed achievements.
I'd say the game is certainly worth playing, especially if you get it on a sale or as part of a bundle. Overall it's a really chill and relaxing game, that manages to not be boring and get you engaged in it quite a bit.
Steam User 10
Whether you're going to enjoy Tacoma is dependent entirely on your stance regarding short games with little in the way of interactivity. The premise of an investigator boarding an abandoned vessel to find out what happened to its crew by way of seeing visions of the past may sound similar to The Return of the Obra Dinn, but the execution is dramatically different: this is not a detective game. This is a pure "walking simulator", for lack of a better descriptor.
Across the two or three hours it may take to complete Tacoma, you'll mostly be walking around, reading text files, and activating AR recordings of what happened in the past few days. There is no player influence on the story, at all. Myself, I don't mind this, especially since the story that's on offer here is really quite strong - it pulls off the impressive feat of making you care about characters that only appear to you as colour-coded silhouettes rather than as actual people, managing to do so thanks to good writing and solid voice-acting. The environments of the Tacoma Lunar Transfer Station itself are visually appealing as well, making for an immersive and believable environment. I enjoyed the time I spent there.
However, that doesn't change what Tacoma fundamentally is: a short, entirely narrative-driven experience. If you like your video games to have more interactivity than that, or if you prefer them a little (or a lot) longer, it's highly unlikely that Tacoma will satisfy you. Basically, your mileage will vary quite dramatically; I would only recommend this to some people, not to everyone.
Steam User 10
Tacoma is a first-person narrative exploration game that presents an astonishing vision of the future. It is an imposing game that has a terrific and intricate setting, and a remarkable atmosphere. The attention to detail is outstanding, the sound design helps make it further engaging, and each character gave something distinctive to the story that every single one feels genuine and unique. Tacoma delivers a satisfying experience nearly in all aspects. It is certainly not a drawn-out game, but it manages to tell a compelling science fiction tale about mortality and relationships in the midst of adversity.
Steam User 23
---{ ☑Graphics☑ }---
☐ You forget what reality is
☐ Beautiful
☑ Good
☐ Decent
☐ Bad
☐ Don‘t look too long at it
☐ MS-DOS
---{ Gameplay }---
☐ Very good
☑ Good
☐ It's just gameplay
☐ Mehh
☐ Watch paint dry instead
☐ Just don't
---{ Audio }---
☐ Eargasm
☑ Very good
☐ Good
☐ Not too bad
☐ Bad
☐ I'm now deaf
---{ PC Requirements }---
☐ Check if you can run paint
☐ Potato
☑ Decent
☐ Fast
☐ Rich boi
☐ Ask NASA if they have a spare computer
---{ Difficulty }---
☐ Just press 'W'
☑ Easy
☐ Easy to learn / Hard to master
☐ Significant brain usage
☐ Difficult
☐ Dark Souls
---{ Grind }---
☑ Nothing to grind
☐ Only if u care about leaderboards/ranks
☐ Isn't necessary to progress
☐ Average grind level
☐ Too much grind
☐ You'll need a second life for grinding
---{ Story }---
☐ No Story
☐ Some lore
☐ Average
☑ Good
☐ Lovely
☐ It'll replace your life
---{ Game Time }---
☐ Long enough for a cup of coffee
☑ Short
☐ Average
☐ Long
☐ To infinity and beyond
---{ Price }---
☐ It's free!
☑ Worth the price
☐ If it's on sale
☐ If u have some spare money left
☐ Not recommended
☐ You could also just burn your money
---{ Bugs }---
☑ Never heard of
☐ Minor bugs
☐ Can get annoying
☐ ARK: Survival Evolved
☐ The game itself is a big terrarium for bugs
---{ ? / 10 }---
☐ 1
☐ 2
☐ 3
☐ 4
☐ 5
☐ 6
☐ 7
☑ 8
☐ 9
☐ 10
Steam User 11
I was vaguely aware of Tacoma for a long time, with the only info I got was "it's not very good" - so I didn't bother. And now that I've tried it, 6 years after release, all I have to say is "I'm sorry, what?". It is good. Potent, varied emotions, lots of little details to find; you know. A good, well-crafted walking simulator with a story told via exploration.
I'm assuming the reason why people used to say it's bad is because it came after Gone Home (dev's previous game), which not only came in the golden age of indies but also had a visible LGBT presence - which made it fresh and successful, especially considering that the mainstream public wasn't used to walking sims. Now, while I'd call Tacoma a better game overall, by the time it came out walking sim wasn't a novelty anymore - and, of course, there was the stink left by the people who took... umbrage at Gone Home's LGBT themes.
In other words - Tacoma didn't deserve to be called a failure. And I invite you to check it out, without preconceptions.
It's hard to really say anything about the game without at least minor spoilers, so I'll instead say that the game really made me care about the characters, and the feels hit me really hard. I had to step back from the game a few times due to the intensity of it all, even though the game's really short.
Just... you know. It is a walking sim. It is a game about looking at objects, listening to character dialogue, paying attention to the finer details due to curiosity, and not some absolute goal. And of course there's no action, but you probably already knew that.
I'd recommend it to anyone who likes tense, character-driven stories - especially if you're into sci-fi in general.
Curator Page
Steam User 6
A nice walking sim exploration game situated in a space station with the crew missing. Takes about an hour and half to explore everything and it is quite an enjoyable experience.
Only trouble I had was that at some point I could not interact with certain items anymore, but a restart fixed it and other than that the Linux version of the game worked without any issues.
Steam User 4
An enjoyable walking simulator that adds some twists with the zero-grav sections. The story is solid, with little details riddled throughout that help expand on both the characters and story.
This was a fun one to 100%, but I would recommend waiting for a sale to snag it.