Tacoma review – You can’t Gone Home again

The characters aboard the station are all interesting people. I had a great time learning out their lives – eavesdropping on their conversations and digging through their files. It feels a bit voyeuristic, but while you’re exploring these areas, you have a reason to be there and you don’t know yet whether these people are alive or dead as you dig through their stuff. You’re just an investigator investigating.

While I dug around, Fullbright’s ability to create real, believable spaces really shone through. Designing a character space in a game feels, in my brain, kind of like moving into a new apartment. It’s easy to design a space, but it’s another to make it feel real. When I see rooms designed to show off game engines, it often feels like everything was arranged just so. It usually feels more like a house staged for sale or for showing on HGTV. Making a place feel like people lived in it requires that people live in it.

To that end, it feels like Fullbright’s designers lived in these spaces as they created them. I get some insights into the hopes and dreams of the characters as I explored.

One crew member’s room is filled with closed boxes, while a couple characters who live together live in a messy space. Sketchbooks dot one character’s spaces, with each showing a different sketch. They don’t feel like items thrown into spots because spaces were empty. And when you watch the wireframe stories left behind by these characters, they match their personalities.

While you watch the conversations flow, you have another opportunity to get to know each of these characters. Each character has an AR desktop that follows them around, and you can peek into these at various times, recovering bits and pieces of their documents from the corrupted data left aboard the ship. Here, you can see their private conversations – again, it feels very voyeuristic, especially with their wireframes standing right there – exposing the hopes for the future they had before the impact and the fears that manifested directly following it.

As naughty as it can feel to rifle through other peoples’ things, it feels intimate, too. As I learned about the crew members and got to know them, they felt more and more real, more and more like friends, despite neither I, nor my avatar Amy, ever meeting them.

Article source: https://www.technobuffalo.com/reviews/tacoma-review/