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 Official site Steam page Trailer Tacoma is the second game created by Fullbright, whom you may know better as the creators of their first game, 2014's Gone Home. Set in 2088, Tacoma has you playing as Amy Ferrier, an employee of the Venturis Corporation tasked with recovering an AI left aboard the titular space station, whose crew is no longer responding. Like Gone Home, Tacoma is a game with no combat and no puzzles, where you can choose to play at your own pace. As you traverse the station, you will have the opportunity to explore every detail of how the crew of six lived and worked, and use the clues that you find to unearth the story of what happened to the crew, and, more importantly, how each one of them chose to face impending disaster. Unlike Gone Home, where much of the game's story was told through a disembodied voiceover, Tacoma's story has been explicitly recorded by the station's systems. Through the magic of the station's AR recording, Amy has the ability to recreate the events aboard Tacoma in the exact 3D spaces where they occurred. Although the details aren't perfect--every crewmember is represented in the recordings by a brightly-colored humanoid blob--the essence of what happened and the words of the crew have been retained, and you have the power to rewind, fast forward, and physically move through the events aboard the station, following every crewmember and story thread wherever they may lead. Tacoma's official release date is August 2nd for Xbox One and PC, but Steam appears to be unlocking it about half a day early, and the game is $2 off if you buy it before then. If Tacoma is anything like Fullbright's previous game, it will likely spawn a great deal of discussion about the story's events, as well as a load of pointless diatribes about whether or not it should be considered a "game." Please post the former in this thread, and the latter somewhere that isn't here.      
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Aug 1, 2017 00:05
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| # ? May 5, 2024 20:59 |
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Gone Home was probably one of my favorite games ever. I'm hopeful that Fullbright can pull it off again!
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Aug 1, 2017 00:12
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I hope I can leave everyone's junk just floating around space then feel bad about it and go around putting it back where I found it.
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Aug 1, 2017 16:31
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the AI is a lesbian
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Aug 1, 2017 16:47
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CharlestonJew posted:the AI is a lesbian So it's a System Shock remake?
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Aug 2, 2017 00:35
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The Guardian liked it! RPS liked it!
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Aug 2, 2017 00:37
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I haven't played this game but based on random other sci-fi games I'm gonna bet that the answer is: In the midst of exciting events, someone's feelings got extremely hurt (possibly because a bad thing happened to them caused by some other rear end in a top hat in the crew) and so they decided to vent either the air, or everybody, into space. When I get this game, probably soon, I'll see if I'm right!
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Aug 2, 2017 01:29
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I thought it was ehhhhhhhh... I liked Gone Home because it sort of tricked and mislead the player, making you "think" the sister had committed suicide, filling the trip to the attic with dread, but then revealing that she'd run off with her lover. Tacoma makes you (huge spoilers?)guess whether they went with the shipping module or all went into cryo, but suprise! They escaped! Also it was a fake accident concocted by the evil corporation to justify fully automating everying with AI but the AI's conspired and saved everyone!. It just didn't really feel like it had an arc and the AI conspiracy revelations felt really last minute even though they were sort of hinted at from the beginning It definitely had the rummage-through-people's-poo poo-to-figure-out-who-they-are element, that I really loved from Gone Home. I also liked the wandering-a-stage-play element of the conversations. I just didn't feel like it converged into an actual meaningful story. I have absolutely no clue what Kotaku was complaining about "waiting" to progress. By the time I was done with each module, the processing was long done. All in all, 7/10, buy when its 10 bucks. Was there any secret stories like the Dad being molested in Gone Home? I certainly didn't spot or pick up on anything but that said (as I mentioned in the Steam thread) I did not unlock all the lockers in the operations wing or the medical reports in the medical wing. EDIT: I also thought there was a bit of setting-realism-dissonance in that each person had their quarters based exactly where their role on the station was. It felt really game-ey. EDIT2: It also hardlock crashed on me (travelling from the bio-med section back to the hub), which for a walking simulator is simply unacceptable. QA can't be hard on a game like this. Snuffman fucked around with this message at 06:42 on Aug 2, 2017 |
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Aug 2, 2017 06:35
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I don't really want to spoiler tag this because you hear it in the first 30 seconds but Amy's ship AI states that the crew status is "evacuated" during the intro. So it's not even a surprise that they made it off the station. But I agree that the story didn't really feel like it had an arc and the final few reveals kind of came out of nowhere. The characters all felt somewhat bare-bones to me too. They're all well-acted and their various reactions of "oh poo poo oh gently caress I might die I can't handle this" were great, but it feels like each crewmember has their one "thing" that all of their personal notes and items focus on and their personality never really goes beyond that. I will give Fullbright credit for making all of that junk feel "real" and the station feel lived-in, but having six characters to focus on meant there wasn't enough time to really dig into any one crewmember's life. You don't get any of the emotional heft you get from Sam's story in Gone Home. I got the achievement "Master of Unlocking" for opening every locked or keypadded thing in the game and I didn't come across any secret stories. The medical report states that Natali has a heart murmur that has an 80% chance of killing her if she goes into cryo but the recordings make it pretty clear what's going on without you having to read the exact details of the report. It was a fun couple hours and I'm glad I bought it, but it's no Gone Home.
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Aug 2, 2017 09:54
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Just finished. Enjoyed it, but in a different way than Gone Home. In GH, you're getting a year (or more) of backstory on a family. You can see bits of there lives for a long span of time, which leaves room for people to grow and change, and for story to unfold. In Tacoma, while you get a few bits from longer ago, the majority of the story given is from a 3-day span of these people's lives. So there's a few twists and turns, but it doesn't feel as, well, broad of a story, I guess. Essentially there are seven story "scenes" that have to tell the main story, so there's just not that much room for much more without adding another whole wing to the station. As for hidden stuff... I think there are some minor things. Nothing on the order of Gone Home's uncle, but things that add to the story... - The complete story of what happened at the Fountain of Paradise and how it informed the story. The station's AI was starting to degrade and show errors in judgement. The station tech knew about it, but due to corporate policy elected not to call in help because he thought the problem was still manageable. A popular blogger went onboard and suffered a broken leg. During treatment, the AI had an error in judgement than resulted in the wrong dose of medication being given, and the patient died. The accident was blamed on the human crew (Sareh) and while she defended herself in court, she ended up getting stuck on a lovely post like Tacoma because of it. Nat finds out about all of this and it informs the way she behaves. She works hard to keep ODIN's CAPRICE scores high, which is probably why he's willing to override the company and do everything he can to save them. She also probably ended up talking to ClueyDog about all this, which is why he was available to talk to Sareh and set up the ODIN rescue. - Clive's employment and relations. Looking in Clive's cabin, you quickly realize that he has kinda hosed up his life. Went to Hilton University, but elected not to be employed by them, so now owes a bunch of financial aid to them. Then he goes to Carnival, but for some reason leaves them, too, and goes to Ventura. At Ventura, he tries to be a social climber, reading books about sucking up to your boss and applying for transfers to administrative positions at other facilities. But because he's moved around so much, he's a bit radioactive. There's a letter where his friend tries to vouch for him at Carnival (to come back), but they rebuff him. Apparently someone who has quit can never be rehired. Ironically, which his career is going down the tubes, his romantic life is picking up. He and E.V. have a budding romance, which gives him great solace when he's afraid he will die. And it is his friend Germaine Burgess, who once again helps him and sends off a shuttlepod to rescue the crew and take them out of the reach of VT. - There's also a little thing where Andrew (secretly?) took his company Loyalty and used it in a risky investment that seems doomed to fail at the story start, which is probably why he's so insistent about staying out in space and earning more Loyalty while his husband and son are begging him to come home and be around more. That the death of Andrew and the rest of the crew would probably have gotten that investment back on track is ironic, as is the fact that by fleeing at the end of the game, he's losing both his Loyalty, the investment and won't see his family for another eight months.
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Aug 3, 2017 21:02
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Finished it today too, I really liked it. I think the conceit of the AR works really well, it enables the developer to present a lot more information while you're rooting through all their stuff. It fit the world really well, too. I don't remember any actual TVs or monitors except in Amy's ship. The whole station is AR-only. Some of the reveals were a little rushed and uneven, but I agree it was a little flat until lots of things happened - about halfway through, in Medical, I think, I started having a lot of questions. Like, one recording was 18 hours old. How did everyone get rescued AND I get here that quickly if it normally took 90 hours for V-T to finally check on a silent station? I actually started to wonder if you were about to find everyone asleep in cryo, but that didn't make sense given the information at the start. So I didn't mind the reveals, they just made things click into place. Bobulus posted:- There's also a little thing where Andrew (secretly?) took his company Loyalty and used it in a risky investment that seems doomed to fail at the story start, which is probably why he's so insistent about staying out in space and earning more Loyalty while his husband and son are begging him to come home and be around more. That the death of Andrew and the rest of the crew would probably have gotten that investment back on track is ironic, as is the fact that by fleeing at the end of the game, he's losing both his Loyalty, the investment and won't see his family for another eight months. I understood this as Venturis pressuring people to re-invest their savings in the company. Folks like Andrew think that's reasonable, I was more angry at the company for encouraging their employees to gamble on their unproven venture. The other touches, like the food packets, different nationalities, mix of old and new books, created a sense of place as well as Gone Home did. I thought it was a well-done story as well as being well-done science fiction. Also, someone tell me they also thought it was hilarious that the advanced AI storage unit in your ship is (30 seconds after starting spoiler) HOUSED IN PLYWOOD.
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Aug 5, 2017 01:08
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Twobirds posted:
From my understanding, Serah and ODIN contacted both Amy/the AI liberation group and the Carnival ship at around the same time, so it makes sense for them to arrive at roughly in the same window. Somewhere earlier, I think Andrew might have mentioned it, Venture's company policy is to send a team to stations that have lost communications within 24-48 hours. That's probably about how long it would take in an ideal situation with protocol (monitoring systems's definitions for how long without communications is considered unusual, dispatching a team to check it out, etc). The practical average of 90 days reflects both the variances of different rescue/investigative situations and also that V-T, evidently, barely gives a poo poo about the fortunes of its working-class crews. The Tacoma crew were lucky that someone was nearby, and it was a ship from a corporation that has both PR and financial incentive to give Venture poo poo as quickly as possible.
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Aug 7, 2017 20:16
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Just curious, is this getting a PS4 release soon? I loved me some Gone Home.
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Aug 10, 2017 03:00
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| # ? May 5, 2024 20:59 |
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CowboyAndy posted:Just curious, is this getting a PS4 release soon? I loved me some Gone Home. It's a timed Xbox exclusive, I don't believe they've said how long that time period is.
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Aug 13, 2017 19:49
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