A space contractor named Amy is sent to investigate the abandoned space station Tacoma in the year 2088. Her job is to recover data while investigating what led to the crew's departure. Amy is able to retrace the crew's conversations with help from some futuristic space technology, ranging anywhere from 3 days ago to 10 hours ago.
Tacoma is a contained story told from multiple perspectives. Most of the information about the small crew of the Tacoma station and their relationships with each other are filled in gradually and indirectly. The player wanders around the station, listening to recordings or digging through personal belongings, trying to piece together what happened before they arrived at the station. At the same time the player must also piece together who Amy is and her true purpose at the station.
The developers did a great job of making the station feel lived in, of making you want to explore every nook and cranny to find out as much info as you can because the story and characters really draw you in. They come from different backgrounds, ethnicities, sexual orientations, and they each have their own interests, motivations and struggles. In the short amount of time Amy has to invade their former living space, it becomes surprisingly easy to connect the faceless projections to the crew member they're meant to represent and sympathize with them.
The final 3 days of the crew's fight for survival is available to Amy in the form of interactive Augmented Reality recordings of the crew's actions and conversations. Each area has multiple interactions that play out all at once; every character will be in a different room doing something different. Amy can fast forward, rewind, and pause the station recordings, and it is always worth re-watching the same scene near a different character to get the full story.
At certain points the option to read a character’s personal files comes up. These help to fill in the reasons for some of the crew’s strange comments or sudden anxieties in their external dialogue. A color-coded marker on the record bar conveniently indicates who to look for and when.
The story had an ever-present yet subtle warning about the ways corporations control and dehumanize those in their employ. Tacoma also had an elegantly simple yet complex gameplay system and I was amazed by how smoothly they managed pull together so many scattered threads and wrap them up with a strong finale. There isn't anything else out there quite like Tacoma.
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