Tacoma is a tense and beautiful sci-fi story about adversity and AI
As I explored the claustrophobic corridors of the space station Tacoma, I couldn’t help but think of a sprawling suburban home in Portland. In 2013, Tacoma developer the Fullbright Company released the seminal Gone Home, a breakthrough game that further cemented a genre disparagingly called “walking simulators” as a valid style of interactive storytelling. It wasn’t the first such game, but Gone Home‘s poignant, personal tale, combined with its dense and lifelike Pacific Northwest setting, made it stand out as particularly powerful. In the intervening years, other creators continued to develop the concept further, including Campo Santo with Firewatch, the Chinese Room’s Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture, and Giant Sparrow’s short anthology…
