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?
