Tacoma is a story you know, in a place you don’t. The characters are familiar and real, but the setting is literally otherworldly.
It is the story of ordinary people in an extraordinary situation.
Tacoma is a first person interactive drama from Fullbright. You play as corporate worker named Amyitjyoti (Amy) Ferrier. You’ve been sent to gather the Onboard Management AI from the abandoned Tacoma Space station. You’ve been hired to go and gather all the recordings of the crew, to find out what happened to cause the station to stop functioning a few days ago.
Tacoma is a Space station. It’s a spiral of rotating metallic bands, steel and glass. A majestic edifice of humanity’s accomplishment.
Except it’s being used as a delivery stop for a hotel.
It’s staffed by a bunch of poorly motivated contractors.
And they’re all doing this job to help them get somewhere else.
It’s sobering and mundane. There’s an immediate contradiction of the most incredible scientific accomplishment, functioning as a supply stop for big business.
This is no quirk of setting. Tacoma’s got anti-corporate theming and messages shaping the narrative all the way through. The game is set in a cyberpunk future that’s surprisingly familiar.
World Currency has been replaced by loyalty funds for spending. These are earned by staying with the company that educated you and raised you.
Space station Workers ironically celebrate “Obscelesence Day” to commemorate the day that unions stopped legislation that would allow companies to replace all space workers with AI.
The ship itself is utilitarian. White and tan panels, with pipework and glass everywhere. It’s impressive, but it’s a workplace.
This makes the human touches around the world appear so much more vibrant. Coming across a party where the crew have put together hats and streamers is somehow so much more disconcerting when you look up and see the orbiting rings of a Space station filtering the sun. 
It’s important to talk about all this, before even considering the gameplay, because the world of Tacoma is fascinating and important. It’s only slightly removed from our own by design. The familiarity inherent in the carefully layered history is a tool to help the player engage, heightening the mystery of this world.
Even more than the world, the people are captivating.
They’re so normal. They’re so human. These people are on a Space station orbiting the earth and they’re more concerned with how their yearly performance review will go. Or whether they can afford to send their kid to college.
This is almost entirely achieved by the excellent voice acting. There are seven main characters, as well as the player character. They are all surprisingly complex, with their stories being fleshed out in an unexpected level of detail. All you’ll be seeing of the characters is wireframes blocked in single shades, but their lives and histories are sketched across their possessions and actions.
You’ll be listening to a lot of dialogue over the three hour course of the game.
Every single voice actor does an exemplary job. They capture the mundanity of doing boring and unimportant work and the small important moments of joy, love and humanity that exist in that corporate space.
The writing is evocative and heartbreaking as you come to know these six people.
But this is an interactive drama. And it makes use of its interactive medium in a way that would be a lot more difficult for a film or radio play. In Tacoma, every action the crew takes, or ever took, is recorded by the onboard AI, Odin. He maps their movements, tracks their messages and actions in an augmented reality scan that can be replayed by the player.
This is where Tacoma makes just as good use of space for the player to engage with, as it does space as a setting.
Rather than finding singular objects and journals to explain the story, Tacoma uses wireframe models and augmented reality to fill the physical space of the station. The player is immersed in the recordings as they play.
Tacoma makes fascinating use of space. In both the physical and cosmic sense.
The conceit of the entire station recording the movements and sounds of every person aboard is used to create augmented reality vignettes.
The opening sequence teaches the player how to use this tool set. The player follows the conversation of the captain of the station, EV. She then goes into a party with her crew after they call out to her. The player literally follows the model into a different room and the rest of the scene unfolds.
The player is given the chance to rewind the recording when it ends. Now standing in the midst of the party from the beginning, the player is surrounded by the other characters having a conversation that they previously couldn’t hear. The player runs through the conversation from another location. On top of this, they are given the option to check some of the crew’s personal records and messages as the conversation goes on.
Mechanically, this is a great conceit. In order to gather the full narrative, the player must engage and explore the conversations physically. This means that the player is constantly exploring and discovering the little details about the story and world.
They look at the books in each crew member’s cabin and can understand their personality.
The blend of spatial movement, conversations, environmental storytelling and more is innovative in a way that should be incredible. Yet while actually playing, Tacoma feels mechanically effortless. Every part combines with such ease that this seems as if the gameplay style has surely existed forever.
The gameplay is not only fun, it’s intuitive and engrossing.
It all comes back to that story and world. Tacoma avoids quickly become boring and trite as the player is forced to hunt for text documents and audio logs for information. Instead, by immersing the player spatially within the information they need, the way the player engages changes. It’s simpler, and something that other games in this style could learn from. It becomes a pleasant adventure through this space. The process of finding the answers behind the mystery of the evacuated station, as well as the lives of the crew, is easy to enjoy.
Tacoma is a fantastic example of an interactive drama. It does an excellent job of combining intricate world building and compelling characters. All of this is packaged within a refreshing mechanical set to just let the player have fun experiencing the story. The whole game is around three to four hours long, and is currently available on Xbox, PC, Linux and Mac.