Tacoma (Fullbright's follow-up to Gone Home, PC / XB1)

johnny_ultimate

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tH6CFQy5cPI

Anyone playing this? Seems to have had a fairly modest arrival despite the prominence and popularity of the developer's first game.

I've only played an hour or so, and was initially a bit wary - the four years since Gone Home have been long ones, and seen a lot of positive and negative developments in the narrative-heavy game arena. Arriving on an abandoned ship is not the most original of prospects - and Lucas Pope's Return of the Obra Dinn seems to be attempting to attach more ambitious mechanics to a similar concept.

That said, while there's still much of this space station to explore, I'm impressed with what Fullbright have done here. It focuses pretty strongly on characters as opposed to the overarching plot, and this so far has been a real strength - details in the environment, logs and actual chunks of 'AR' narrative quickly coalesce to give these people genuine depth. It's a touch fidgety at times - each AR section is multi-layered, and while it creates impressively dynamic 'dioramas' to explore from several perspectives, rewinding to read glitchy emails isn't quite as compelling.

Overall though, Tacoma seems like a more mature game that has learned lessons from Gone Home & others and applied them to create a passive story that nonetheless allows you to more actively engage with the story elements being presented. Plus some zero-g basketball, just 'cos.

Encrypted Pigeon

Liked it, similar to gone home with its investigative storytelling. I agree the AR was a bit fidgety, it didn't come to me immediately that I would have to rewind, to ensure I was capturing all the crews dialog, and when I did, I did not really want to traverse back to do it all over again, so I probably missed out on very early bits. The game took me about 3 hours, taking my time, which was good because it means I have a chance to actually finish a game these days.