Personal difficulties have been resolved, and so I’m catching up on writing about some of the vast backlog of games I’ve accrued over the past few months. I’ll never have time to write full reviews of all of these, so I’ll instead settle for a few paragraphs about each one.
Tacoma
An interesting one. Tacoma is the next game from Gone Home developers Fullbright, and while I liked Gone Home very much I didn’t get on with Tacoma quite so well despite the setting being very much My Jam: instead of wandering around a spooky abandoned house trying to piece together what happened prior to your arrival, you’re instead wandering around an abandoned space station trying to piece together what happened prior to your arrival, with some AI stuff thrown into the mix. It’s a more sedate game than Gone Home was because at no point does Tacoma really try and trick you or really throw you any curveballs; the focus is instead purely on unravelling the station’s immediate past, with very few twists concealed within that past. It’s also more overtly linear than Gone Home was; Gone Home’s mansion allowed it a little more artifice in how it camouflaged its plot rails, while Tacoma doesn’t even try to hide it — there are four areas of the station, you tackle them one after another, and you cannot move on to the next one until you’ve finished all the plot in the current one.