Sci-fi mystery Tacoma goes where few video games have gone before

An abandoned space station. A missing crew. A sentient artificial intelligence at the centre of the mystery.

This might sound like theeeriesetting for a gory first-person shooter likeDoomor a menacing survival-horror game likeSystem Shock. But in the recently releasedTacoma, it'sthe foundation for a quieter, more philosophical story that feels exceptionally attuned to modern-day insecurities.

It's the year 2088. The six-person crew of the Tacoma lunar transfer station has vanished following an unknown incident. You play as AmyFerrier, a contractorsent to the stationto retrieve itsartificial intelligence, named ODIN, and find out what happened to the crew.

To do so, you have to examine digital recordings of key events in the crew members' lives over the months, days and hours before Amy's arrival.

Fullbright, the Portland-based indiegame studio behind Tacoma, has built a reputation for gamesthat prioritize believable human relationships over Hollywood-style action sequences. In Tacoma, you're there to learn about the crew, not save them from imminent danger.

"It's really a mystery game about you discovering the place that these characters lived in, and the details of their lives," said SteveGaynor, co-founder ofFullbright.

Augmented reality and AI

Youuntangle thegame's centralmystery by going through a variety of recorded material, thanks to the all-encompassing surveillance culture of Fullbright's vision of the future.

VenturisTechnologies, the corporation that owns the station, has recorded the crew's time aboard every team meeting, conversation and even private moments in their personal quarters.

Seen through a futuristic augmented-reality (AR) app, you can view snippets of theseconversationsto learn more about the station's former inhabitants, who arerepresented by faceless, colour-codedavatars that pulse with every word and move with unnerving verisimilitude.

You can also fast-forward and rewind through these recordings, and follow the walking, talking holograms as they walk around the now-abandoned station.

You canlisten to a conversation between two characters, for instance, and a third might later join them. You can pause the action, rewind it and follow that third character to see what they were doing, and who they were talking to before that meeting.

You can also gather clues by riflingthrough objects strewn about the station. You'll learn as much about the crew through the cocktail recipes written on the kitchen chalkboardor the postcards kept in their personal quarters, as you will through their AR recordings.

A 'mundanedystopia'

Tacomais not a long game it takes roughly three to four hours from start to finish. But in that time, it paints the picture of a fascinating future that is simultaneously progressive and diversebut remains mired in class struggle, with workers under the thumb of their corporate overlords.

Gaynor describes it as a "mundane dystopia."

The station's crew includes men and women, as well asseveral ethnic backgrounds and sexual orientations.Chyronsaround the station are displayed in multiple languages and scripts. Amy uses American Sign Language to write her name when logging into the station's digital interface.

Despite theStar Trek-like social mosaic,Venturisand othermega-corporations(including fictionalized versions of Amazon and Carnival Cruise Line) have a vise-like grip on its workers' lives. Company "loyalty" points can be cashed in like currencybut are lost if you leave your employer. Can you afford to look for another job if it means losing your next house paymentor your son's university tuition?

'Walking simulators'

Tacoma is asci-fi take on theimmersivetheatre experience multi-tiered performances not limited to a single stage pioneeredby experimental projects such asSleep No More.

Gaynor and his team havebeen refining this spatial, non-linear storytelling in games for a few years. Before they co-founded Fullbright in 2012, they worked on the blockbuster shooter Bioshock2, whichblendedhigh-octane shootingwithimmersivestorytelling.

Fullbright'sfirst game, 2013'sGone Home, swappedBioshock'sfantastical settingfor an empty mansion in1990sPortland. It won critical acclaim for telling the emotionallyimpactfulstory of theGreenbriarfamily, from the father Terry's fledgling writing career to his teenage daughter Sam's coming to terms withher sexuality.

Like Tacoma, it laid out clues for you to explore around the Greenbriar residence without sci-fi flourishes like the AR recordings.

ButGone Homewas also the target of derision from some players, who lambasted its short play time (you can finish it in undertwo hours)and lack of traditional video-game mechanics there are no enemies to defeat, no brain-teasing puzzles to solve.

It waspart of a growing genre of games, such asDear EstherorThe Stanley Parable,that prioritized storytelling over mechanics. Some argued they weren't games at all, labelling them"walking simulators."

'I'm an art school kid'

Gaynorappeared unperturbed bythe debate.

"I'm an art school kid ...I spent a lot time early on in those 'What is art?'discussions. And that's given me a kind of permissive view of how you define or label things like that," he said.

Fullbrightappears to have taken at least some of these concerns to heart.Manipulating and following Tacoma's AR recordings demands a more active role from players than reading and listening to diaries in Gone Home.

"Our goal is to make the player not be a passive observer, but to be actively involved inunravellingthe story and putting it all back together," saidGaynor.

"The fact that we introduced new mechanics, and thought differently about how you engage with these story moments, is something that I hope makes the experience feel valuable to players when they put their hands on it."