Tacoma

The pitch: a space station, an AI, and a story told from every angle at once

Tacoma is the second game from Fullbright, the studio behind 2013's Gone Home, released worldwide as a full 1.0 on 1 August 2017 with no Early Access period. You play a contractor sent to recover the artificial intelligence aboard the seemingly abandoned Tacoma lunar transfer station, and in the process piece together what happened to its six-person crew during a disaster days earlier. Roughly 3,500 Steam reviews later it sits at Very Positive, about 88% positive -- a strong number that, read against the review text itself, turns out to be carrying a genuinely two-sided conversation about whether the game's short runtime does its own best idea justice.

The mechanic almost everyone credits: watching a crisis from every angle

Where Gone Home told its story through static notes, audio logs and environmental details laid out for the player to find in whatever order they wandered into them, Tacoma's core innovation is its AR Data Recordings: augmented-reality reconstructions of the crew's final days that you can pause, rewind and fast-forward, and -- crucially -- follow between rooms to watch different crew members' simultaneous actions unfold from whichever perspective interests you at that moment. It's a specific, mechanically real answer to a limitation the genre has always had, and reviewers on both sides of the recommend line single it out for real credit. One positive review calls it "well executed," noting the ability to physically walk between two characters' overlapping conversations mid-playback and catch details a single fixed viewpoint would miss entirely. Even several negative reviews, while unhappy with the story built on top of it, concede the recording system itself is a genuine formal advance over the studio's first game.

Where the same reviewers turn critical: not enough time for six people

Set the recording mechanic aside, and Tacoma's review page has a consistent, recurring argument with itself about whether the story built on top of it earns its ending. The crew numbers six, each introduced with real specificity -- distinct voices, personal quirks, visible relationships with each other -- but multiple reviewers argue the two-to-five-hour runtime simply doesn't give any one of them enough screen time to make the climax's emotional stakes land the way the writing clearly wants them to. "There's way too many characters for the amount of writing there is," one reviewer puts it, arguing there's "nowhere near a big enough picture of any one" crew member to feel truly invested by the end. That's a specific, structural complaint rather than a vague "I didn't like it," and it recurs independently across reviews written years apart, including from players who came in as fans of Gone Home specifically hoping for more of the same intimacy scaled up.

A second, related complaint compounds it: despite the freedom to explore the station and choose which character's perspective to follow moment-to-moment, the underlying story is almost entirely linear, unlocking in a fixed chronological order regardless of how you explore it. Several reviewers explicitly prefer Gone Home's more implied, player-assembled version of storytelling and call Tacoma's more literal, laid-out narrative a step backward even while praising the technology used to deliver it -- a genuinely interesting tension between "the how" and "the what" that the review page argues about more than it agrees on.

Length, price and what "short" actually means here

The complaint that shows up most often in raw volume, though, is simpler: Tacoma is short. Most reviewers report finishing in two to five hours, and a meaningful number explicitly frame their verdict around whether that length justifies the asking price rather than around the writing or mechanics at all. One reviewer who bought it before launch for a comparable price to today's NZ$28.99 notes finishing it in two hours flat and feeling shortchanged; others who went in expecting a short, focused experience -- and budgeted their expectations for the genre accordingly -- describe the same runtime as entirely appropriate for what the game is trying to do. It's less a flaw in the game than a mismatch some buyers hit and others don't, and it's worth weighing your own tolerance for a tightly-scoped narrative experience before paying full price rather than after.

A smaller technical thread is worth flagging too: a handful of reviews, including at least one written this year, describe inconsistent controller button-mapping across different input devices -- Xbox controllers, third-party pads, and Steam Deck on Linux all reportedly behaving differently from each other in the same session. It doesn't appear frequently enough across the review corpus to call a systemic problem, but it's concrete and specific enough, on a game this close to its tenth anniversary, that controller players should go in aware it isn't guaranteed to be seamless.

Verdict

Tacoma earns its Very Positive rating on the strength of a genuinely inventive central mechanic -- letting players physically move between simultaneous character perspectives inside a rewindable recording is a real, mechanically distinct step forward for narrative-first exploration games, not just a reskin of Fullbright's earlier work. Whether the six-person cast and corporate-AI story built on top of that mechanic earns its ending in the time given is a genuine, recurring argument within the game's own review page, and it's fair to go in expecting a short, largely linear experience rather than the fully player-directed mystery the early exploration might suggest. Play it for the recording system and the atmosphere, and treat the emotional payoff as a real but imperfect bonus on top of that.