Tacoma
(
2017
)
When Fullbright’s first game, Gone Home [2013], was released, the press greeted it with the kind of rapturous praise which is usually reserved for once-in-a-generation masterpieces. Indeed, the game was so lauded by the commentariat that the glowing praise exacerbated the tensions between professional reviewers and their audience when it became obvious that average gamers were looking for something very different from games than the professional reviewers. Yet despite all this, Tacoma, Fullbright’s follow-up to Gone Home [2013], a sci-fi adventure game set in a derelict space station received mixed reviews and muted praise, even from outlets and critics who lauded the original. I doubt that any of this was due to the controversy of Gone Home [2013], as in the intervening years, the press has shown nothing but contempt and scorn for gamers at large, and their critics among them in particular. Nor is it anything to do with the oversaturation of walking simulators, as games like Firewatch [2016] continue to pull in positive press coverage.
I suspect that the real reason Tacoma was not as well received as the studio’s earlier outing is the setting. Gone Home [2013] was set entirely in a mid-90s suburban house that was instantly familiar and comfortable for the vast majority of reviewers. Moreover, the characters in Gone Home [2013] seemed engineered to appeal to the aging, pseudo-intellectuals that still idolized their youthful rebellious phase to a, frankly, ludicrous degree; with their “cool” music, and parents who “just don’t understand.” The main selling point for Gone Home [2013] was the nostalgia it generated; the warm feelings of a more innocent, comfortable time blinded many reviewers to the game’s glaring faults. So, when Tacoma sent the player into an alien and unfamiliar setting, the writers, who were happy rummaging around their high school notebooks, immediately took offense and being kicked out of their comfort zone. Never mind that in terms of writing, environment design, storytelling, and (most of all) characters, Tacoma is miles ahead of Gone Home [2013]. This is an excellent example of why subjective feelings like nostalgia, cannot be the sole reason for a serious appraisal of a work: you’re bound to look like a fool to anyone who does not share those same subjective emotions.
The game opens with your character, a sub-contractor named Amy, arrives on a damaged space station. She’s been hired by The Venturis Corporation to pull the station’s Augmented Reality records and bring back all the collected data in the wake of a catastrophic station failure. The first thing I noticed was the care with which this environment had been constructed. Gone Home [2013] could rely on real-world items and stock furniture because the setting was so familiar, but not so with Tacoma. The alien setting of the space station demands everything is designed from the ground up and made to feel at once familiar and bizarre. Unlike Gone Home [2013], nobody would mistake this for an asset flip. Moreover, a good deal of research has been done to make the station as realistic as possible, from the bathroom fixtures to the ubiquitous use of snake plants as oxygen recyclers. Better yet, the world building is incredibly subtle, the best bit being a half-finished crossword puzzle that teases all sorts of superfluous details about the world circa 2088. It’s a detail so small that it’s very easy to overlook, and is a refreshing change of pace compared to Gone Home’s drip-fed voice-over narrations that seemed hell bent of destroying every shred of ambiguity.
The space station Tacoma was, until recently, crewed by six employees of the Venturis Corporation. They are commander E.V. St. James, engineer Roberta Williams (named for the famed adventure game designer behind King’s Quest [1984] and Phantasmagoria [1995]), botanist Andrew Dagyab, medic Sareh Hasmadi, code-monkey Natali Kuroshenko, and guy whose job I could never figure out Clive Siddiqi. The crew is also assisted by an AI called ODIN, who is regarded as a tool by the crew members except for Sareh who has an oddly close and tender relationship with the machine. One night there is an explosion during dinner (the table they sit at is a playful homage to the famous dinner scene in Alien (1979) where the xenomorph bursts out of the infected crewman’s chest, alas nothing so bloody or interesting will be happening anytime in the course of this game). The crew discovers that their communications system is down and that an oxygen tank has burst. With no chance of signaling help, and even less of any arriving before their supply of air is exhausted the crew bets everything on a last-ditch effort to escape in a modified, unmanned probe.
As you explore the environment, you’ll start to discover various AR recordings of the station’s former crew. Scenes play out in a given area all at once, so if one crew member is talking on the phone in her office, while the others are baking a cake, you will have to actually go into her office to hear her conversation. If you then want to see what the guys baking the cake were discussing, you’ll have to rewind the recording and walk back into the kitchen. So, throughout each scene, there are multiple sub-scenes playing out concurrently, often overlapping with each other. It gives us a chance to see different sides of the characters, like in one memorable moment when the station’s commander E.V. St. James gives a stirring speech to her crew before retiring to the next room with her lover and admitting that they are all most likely doomed. The logistical hurdles of this kind of storytelling must have been immense, blocking each character and making sure that everyone has something to do while the other scenes are playing out is no small feat. There is only one major time where Tacoma drops the ball in this department when the ship’s medic Sareh Hasmadi heads off to a side room to have a panic attack. Sure, the situation warrants such a response, the trouble is Sareh is perfectly calm both before and after her nervous breakdown. Boy, I wish that my anxiety would subside that quickly!
The characters are probably the area where Fullbright has improved the most from their first outing. Sure, their personalities are pretty limited, and their various racial, gender, and sexual identities make them feel like something of a burger king kids’ club (for those keeping score we have four women, five people of color, and three gays; that last figure is so high that I suspect the governments of the future are encouraging homosexuality al la The Forever War), but considerably more care has been taken with them than with Lonnie or Sam. None of these figures are inherently absurd (like the punk girl who is also in the ROTC), though there are a few oversights. Sareh, the religious Muslim who practices Buddhist meditation is probably the worst offender of the bunch. Clearly, Fullbright was a bit too desperate to cram in yet another religious minority and tried to make her pull double duty. One thing has not changed though, the writing team is absolutely wretched when it comes to romantic dialogue. Case in point, one exchange has Clive wishing that he could feel the pull of earth’s gravity with E.V. Pro-tip: if your romantic dialogue is cheesier than the stuff in Transformers: Dark of the Moon (2011) (I will love you till the end of time), don’t write romance.
The tension in the story is somewhat undermined by the cast as well. I know that Fullbright won’t dare kill a minority, female, or gay character lest they suffer the wrath of the woke commentators, so I started off the game comfortable in the knowledge that not a single character was in any real danger. I imagine the scenes later in the game where the escape plan has failed, the remaining oxygen is almost depleted and hope is almost completely lost would have had more impact if there was a white guy on the station that I knew the writers could kill without any out-of-game consequence. Moreover, the game suffers from the same problem that I observed in Bird Box (2018), that when all the characters are protected minorities none of them are allowed to have any personality. There was nobody onboard Tacoma that rubbed me the wrong way and despite their carefully defined personalities nobody that really stood out from the noise. They were all boring, bland, and unobjectionable professionals doing the best they could under the circumstance. Some more abrasive figures and some real interpersonal conflict would have been a welcome addition to the story.
I mentioned above that the world building was very subtle and very well executed in this game, but I suspect that it has a few implications that Fullbright didn’t intend, and would be horrified to discover. The world of Tacoma is one where corporations have come to dominate society, in a way that resembled the neo-feudalism of Alfred Bester’s novel The Stars my Destination AKA Tiger, Tiger. Employees work for a single employer for an extended period of time not to build up money and independence, but to cultivated “brand loyalty” that can be exchanged for everything from houses to college educations. It’s a bleak future, where democracy has long since been extinguished by the powerful cadre of international capital. Corporations, not individuals, are now responsible for guiding the decisions of nations. Yet this world does not look like a dystopia, certainly not in the ways in which we generally imagine. There are no racial or even cultural tensions, at least as evidenced by our burger king kids club of a crew. Hell, even the Muslim crew-member has no issue whatsoever with the three homosexuals that she serves with, a fact that suggests all the religious turmoil of the late 20th and early 21st centuries has been quietly resolved by 2088. The corporations dominating society do not suppress ideas, as evidenced by the variety of philosophical, religious, and political literature that the crew has on their bookshelves. Moreover, the standard of living on even a second-rate station like Tacoma is downright luxurious when compared to modern day accommodations in any of the larger North American cities.
Tacoma thus shows us a future that only the most starry-eyed anarcho-capitalists would dare imagine: One where market forces have taken over society completely and done away with the irrational and unprofitable ventures of war and intolerance. Mankind thus free from concerns over doctrinal strife, international borders, or personal bigotry (and properly motivated by a fair paycheck) is finally free to reach our full potential. Under this system, mankind has conquered the stars and created artificial life which rivals our own in sophistication (the AIs like ODIN). Far from a grimdark future, this is the glittering utopia promised by the character Jensen in his thunderous speech near the end of Network (1976): “There are no nations. There are no people.... There is only one holistic system of systems, one vast and immune, interwoven, interacting, multivariate, multinational dominion of dollars… One vast and ecumenical holding company, for whom all men will work to serve a common profit, in which all men will hold a share of stock, all necessities provided, all anxieties tranquilized, all boredom amused.” This worldview is somewhat contradicted by the game’s twist, where it is revealed that Venturis Corporation itself sabotaged the Tacoma in order to score political points but this hardly refutes all the good done in the world. The actions of Venturis Corporation are an aberration, as we can plainly see, one taken under a desperate circumstance. Even then, the ruthlessness of even the most feckless corporations we see in Tacoma is a far sight better than the average nation-state in our own time.
Like Gone Home [2013], this game is ludicrously short. My playtime reflects a conscious attempt to do literally everything I possibly could in the game. I examined every item in detail, listened to every part of each scene, found all the little hidden rooms, listen to all the commentary tracks (and chucked every valuable personal item in the crew's quarters into the garbage for a laugh). People playing the game in a more casual fashion will probably finish it in 2-3 hours. This game, at time of writing, retails at about $20 and even though I think it’s a step in the right direction for Fullbright, I can’t honestly recommend it to anyone at that price. Indeed, I would have never gotten this game had it not been recently given away for free on Humble Bundle. Even then, most of the enjoyment I got from this game was the result of being pleasantly surprised after playing through the absolute dreck of Gone Home [2013]. I suspect that people who do not write reviews of every game they play and post them on their early 2000s style blog will derive considerably less enjoyment from Tacoma than I did.