Oct 222018
Who told me Tacoma was a horror game?
Oh well, exploring an abandoned space station to investigate a mysterious incident is a creepy enough premise to count.
(On that note, a lot of the non-horror games we end up looking at in October tend to be “creepy” rather than exactly “spooky.” Maybe I should have called this Celebrating All Things Creepy.)
I had my doubts about Tacoma, because I didn’t enjoy Gone Home. I found the ending disappointing and the love story less-than-stellar. Fortunately, Tacoma proved to be a pleasant surprise.
Aboard the space station, you tap into its AR digital recordings, which essentially let you see moments of the crew’s activity actually unfold. These recordings included multiple points of additional AR information you could grab, and you could restart, rewind, or fast forward each recording as you pleased.
This is a really cool way to handle that sort of storytelling. I enjoyed following characters through a given recording and then rewinding to see what the other characters were doing at the same time.
It’s a short game, taking me about 2 and a half hours to play, but that’s enough time to learn about the crew, their relationship, and the incident, leaving you invested in the outcome as the station’s final recordings play out. It ended up being much less creepy than I expected – I’d call it a science fiction story rather than sci-fi horror – but it was an enjoyable experience.
I enjoyed it so much more than Gone Home, I’m baffled as to why it got lower review scores. Walking sim? Sure, but one with a good story and a neat method of storytelling. At least it sounds like Fullbright is still developing games, because if their next game is like Tacoma, I’ll definitely give it a try.
What did you think of Tacoma?
I enjoyed what little I played of Tacoma and look forward to playing more when I have a better computer. However, I agree I never thought of Tacoma as a horror game.
I believe it’s also out for the PS4 now.
“Maybe I should have called this Celebrating All Things Creepy”
You can celebrate me, then~
Just to clarify, in Tacoma, everyone just walks around with AR glasses on their person?
Are you calling yourself creepy?
High-tech sci-fi things you attach to your head that lets you see the AR recordings, actually. The main character gets them on board the space station when she arrives.
Yeah, calling it that would make it feel creepy. Like you were celebrating creeps. xD
Never heard of this game. Gone Home seemed OK to watch, not sure how it would feel to play. This could be worth a watch but less exciting as a play too from the sounds of it.
True. XDD
For this sort of game, I’d say watching vs. playing are probably similar experiences, since they’re so focused on the narrative. I liked the interaction in Tacoma, though, since I could pause or rewind the recordings and decide which characters to follow.
That is a really cool feature for a game like this. :> It was nice being able to do that in Life Is Strange.
Tacoma also encourages it by having things you can read only at certain points in each recording, with them indicating on the recording’s timeline so you know if you missed one and need to rewind.
[…] You might be able to read some romance into it if you squint, but really it’s a story about non-romantic relationships and moral questions regarding androids. It still has love as a core theme, so it’s kinda like when I reviewed Tacoma during my horror month. […]