Tacoma

Despite telling myself I wasn’t going to jump on sales this year, I have failed on several occasions to restrain myself. Especially when games on my wish list keep cropping up for less than £5. In response to this, I severely whittled down my wish list removing any trash that I didn’t have a reason to keep on there, limiting myself to wanted titles, platformers and open world games. Tacoma doesn’t fit into any of these categories but I think someone recommended it so into the collection it went.

Tacoma follows the story of Amy, who is tasked with going aboard the abandoned space station, Tacoma, to retrieve an AI program at the request of some corporation. The game centres around exploring the various areas of the station and recovering the memories of those that were aboard. Amy uncovers that the crew were in trouble after something collides with the station and the memories describe their attempts to escape certain death.

Game play elements are fairly limited and while it’s labelled an adventure game, it’s closer to a visual novel. You cannot die and the objective is to look at the memories left behind by the crew to work out what happened while the main goal is retrieving data and the gathering of memories appears to be something to do while you wait for data retrieval to happen.

Some of the load times were a bit long and Amy doesn’t walk very fast. I was able to get through the game is just over 3 hours despite this so there’s no a lot to do and what’s there is drawn out. Looks wise and sound wise it doesn’t put a foot wrong and it all contributes to the isolated atmosphere of the station and the crew’s perils.

Regarding the other characters, there’s a real mix of lore surrounding them and they are all interesting in their own right. They do appear to have gone full on in pursuit of the diversity card as there is a heady mix of races and clear gay and lesbian characters. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with this but it does feel a little forced at times, especially with Andrew’s secret gay relationship.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 12 Achievements

A short game with a short list but a rather weird one too. The list is 90% collectible based and really tests your ability to explore… or prepare.

There are five achievements for performing various actions on the station, such as playing basketball, rebuilding a science skeleton, going to the gym and rebuilding a broken sign. Sickeningly, some of these ridiculously obscure actions are hidden behind secret achievement blockers making unlocking them naturally nearly impossible unless you have bizarre natural tendencies to do weird shit for no reason.

There is another achievement for finding 7 cat memories and some of these are in really obtuse locations where I can only imagine you need to know where to look in order to find them. Again, there is another one for finding a wedding ring towards the end of the game and as you can imagine, something so small is incredibly hard to find… unless you already know where it is.

While there are achievements that unlock during the course of play, there are a set that only unlock when you finish the game. The problem with this is obvious – you only find out at the end of the game whether you’ve missed something and while I was able to unlock all bar one of the achievements, the one I missed – for finding all the AR Records – was because I didn’t click on one square during my playthrough. Thankfully, it’s not a long game and nothing becomes permanently missable. Even with my need to revisit locations, it still took less than 3 hours to complete.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Tacoma is a relaxing and interesting game to play though it does verge a little close to a walking simulator at times. Achievement wise, it’s easy with a guide but makes it slightly harder to enjoy the underlying story if following words to ensure you don’t miss stuff.