Tacoma is an incredibly linear game with very little the player can do to change the course of their play through. At its core, all the player needs to do is to access each crew member's AR desktop and unlock any doors necessary to view said desktops. There are three main zones, each with two acts contained within them, and each zone is only unlocked when the previous zone is explored. In an analog sense, it would be akin to playing Clue, if the players were only required to uncover every piece of information from each room, and once the players did so, the answer to the game’s mystery would be given. The game never tests the player for their comprehension of this information, yet I and most players were intrigued enough to fully explore this world and its miniature details. Personally, I filled out several pages of notes based on every single piece of dialogue, every desktop panel, and assorted items scattered throughout the ship. Tacoma prioritizes world-building as a way of overcoming traditional criticisms of linear games, and thus creates a game that prioritizes observing its plot int the context of a larger world.
Linearity is often derided in games because of its potential, if misused, to dissuade players from exploring the game’s world and thus prioritizing completing a game over experiencing it. Because if a game only prioritizes reaching the end, then why should the player be forced to play the less-prioritized parts of the game? But this is only a valid criticism if the game has a world worth experiencing, and linearity is often intended in a game where the setting is not designed to be explored—only traveled through in order to experience the story. Linearity has only become a dirty in more recent eyars as games have shifted from being a collection of discrete levels to being a single, large world with a huge number of possible playstyles. So how does Tacoma avoid this criticism of linear games, and simultaneously be intriguing to play through and explore?
Part of what makes the entire game feel so intriguing is how every single item that the player can pick up feels real and necessary. Objects like the ketchup pouches flop around when they are rotated in their inspection. There is no gameplay reason for these objects to be so accurately modeled, yet its inclusion implies that each of these pouches are filled with liquid that is meant for the Tacoma’s crew to use. Every item in the ship has a story, and a meaning behind its inclusion. Most of the time, their inclusion is for utilitarian purposes, but even then it shows that Tacoma is a space station first, and as the setting of a video game second. Other items such as discarded ramen bowls, and used cigarettes emphasizes that real people lived on this ship, and none of them were perfect in their habits. As an example, the player initially finds used cigarettes well before seeing Natali smoking near ODIN’s data center. Until then, no single crewmember can be definitely labeled as the smoker, so the player is left to assume that one of the crew is under an incredible amount of stress, and that is their chosen coping mechanism. The inclusion of smaller minigames like the basketball court seem like even stranger inclusions to the space station atmosphere. The basketball court would certainly assist with crew exercise—something the game takes an entire act to emphasize. But its placement outside the exercise center implies that it is intended for recreation—not something that Venturis is known for encouraging in its push for infinite efficiency. In terms of gameplay, the basketball game feels lackluster, probably because basketball is meant to be played between two opponents, and the basketball game serves to emphasize that the player is completely alone and isolated from other human life.
Beyond the interaction with physical elements of Tacoma’s world come the hints to a living, breathing world beyond that of the space station. Assorted books and flyers hint at a culture that created them. Some, like the union pamphlet in Sareh’s mailbox, begin to sow questions about the business atmosphere back on Earth that could lead space-workers to want to unionize. Other pieces of information, like Sareh’s password being based on her graduation year, grounds the characters into a world that is not too different from our own. This is a universe that, although futuristic, still has similar features of our everyday lives.
In a similar fashion, one can find books and a note in Sareh’s room that fill out more of the grief she is feeling. Another game would have just mentioned that a patient died under Sareh’s care and that an AI might have failed in its job. Instead, the silence over Sareh’s past fleshes out the fear she has for Natali when Sareh prepares her for cryo-sleep. The player finds themselves privy to information that very few of the crew know, and thus they find themselves with an emotional connection to her—someone they do not interact with at all, and someone whose actions cannot be altered. In spite of its linearity, Tacoma makes its world meaningful and intriguing, and players become intrigued by its world insofar as they will try to tease apart many of its details.
Beyond physical and emotional artifacts, evidence of Earthen policies and interactions connects the space station with its home planet, and lessens the isolation that video game worlds face when trying to build a setting. Extra-terrestrial games such as DOOM (1993) thrive on being detached from from Earth, as it allows the games to be freed from Earthen responsibilities and expectations. Games that take place in the past, such as the Assassin’s Creed series take a similar approach by making their settings in a time that is beyond the lifetimes of its players. Tacoma, however, takes place in 2088 and in a timeline where modern-day debates still prove relevant. Its setting is close enough temporally to the presentday that Tacoma can draw on modern-day issues and reframe them in a practical sense. The debate of automation of tasks normally run by humans in the name of profits is incredibly central to the game’s storyline. As the player finds different snippets of AI-related information in desktops, evidence for both sides of the debate come up, such as the financial infeasibility of a human-run space station, and also the potential for AI to decay and produce erroneous results. Both arguments take fears that modern-day people have regarding AI, and thus Tacoma station feels both less foreign and more relatable.
Tacoma’s decision to deprive the player of their agency ends up being a powerful choice. The player now has to take in all the information presented to them on Tacoma and decide what is going to be important for the story as a whole. And by not knowing what is important, and by being intrigued by the world’s similarity to their own, everything feels important all at once. That makes the Tacoma’s world engaging and valuable, which goes against the traditional expectations for linear games.
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