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dkirschner's Tacoma (PC)

[July 1, 2019 08:14:38 PM]

This was the best of the internet cafe games. An outstanding story with a phenomenal presentation. Instead of playing as the crew while Bad Things happen on their ship, you play as someone come later to investigate what happened. In Fullbright style, you do this through exploring the environment of the Tacoma space station, picking up and examining objects, going through the crew members' personal effects, and learning more and more about them and what happened to them.

The new thing, and what I loved so much, is how exactly you interact with the crew. Yeah, they're in the past, and normally you would ONLY go through notebooks and things, perhaps listen to voice recordings or watch videos, but here it's interactive. They were recorded and you wear an AR device which lets you see vignettes as they lived them in the space where you are. One of the first ones is a party. You enter the common area and are prompted to play back the recording. As you watch the six crew members' silhouettes (lovingly color-coded and labeled with nice UI touches and character designs so you know who is who) moving about the area and engaging in conversations, you too move around and follow them as they walk and socialize. You can pause, rewind, and fast forward the vignette. When a character brings up their AR desktop (their computer), you can access it and see what they were looking at (usually read some emails or text messages that expand on the story). It's really brilliant. You'll usually rewind vignettes two or three times because characters who access their AR desktops are usually not co-present. The specific character who accesses their desktop is indicated on the recording interface at the time they access it, and if they're not in front of you, you can go find them, or wait until you see them, then rewind and follow them to the point in time where the pulled up their desktop and then access it.

All this makes for a really, really cool style of interactive storytelling. Obviously, if you liked Gone Home and enjoy other "walking simulators" that tell a good story, then this is another to play. But due to the more interactive storytelling, it feels faster paced than many in the genre.