Whether by design or by coincidence, Fullbright brings us another detective ghost story as players are expected to piece together a mystery in an environment devoid of people but full of contextual clues. Tacoma is set on the space station of the same name - a relatively unimportant refuelling and cargo delivery waypoint to the other orbiting stations owned by the conglomerate Venturis Technologies - and its skeleton crew of six people: E.V. St. James, the station's administrator; Clive Siddiqi, the operations manager; Sareh Hasmadi, the medical officer; Andrew Dagyab, the botanist; Roberta "Bert" Williams (I see what you did there), the mechanical engineer; and Natali Kuroshenko, the AI and computers specialist. And, of course, there's also ODIN: the station's AI.

When you first start exploring the Tacoma station as recovery subcontractor Amy Ferrier some three days after a catastrophic explosion that took out both the ship's oxygen supply and its outward communications, you're not quite sure what happened, where the crew went, or what might have transpired between the point where the oxygen vented and the moment you stepped on board. Your own AI, Minny, determines that there is still enough reserve oxygen left for a single human being on the station, and so you open the connecting airlock determined to figure out what happened and complete your corporate-mandated objective of recovering the station's AI for closer examination. Rather than talking to people, you tap into the recorded dialogue and "AR desktop" usage of the crewmembers, represented in these flashbacks as vague polygonal people with a tint that is color-coded to each member: E.V. is purple, Sareh is blue, Andrew is green, etc.. From listening into their conversations and, essentially, looking over their shoulders as they interact with their built-in computer/monitor displays you begin to piece together what occurred.

As with Fullbright's previous game Gone Home, a lot of the game is contingent on gathering enough information in a certain area of the map before the game is satisfied that you're following the plot and contrives a way for you to open up the next area and keep moving on. In Tacoma, this comes from installing a pad which pulls AI data from each section of the ship - Personnel, Biomedical, Engineering - but the process is artificially lengthened to give you an excuse to explore these areas, overhear conversations, pick up and examine the crew's keepsakes, and give you a bigger picture of these peoples' lives in addition to their response to the calamity at hand. One such thread you can choose to pick at is Bert and Nat's relationship: they fell in love and were married since their deployment on the station, Nat having since moved into Bert's quarters with her own long repurposed as storage. You also learn that Bert dropped her wedding ring at one point (and you can recover it for her, if you're able to spot it) and that Nat wasn't "gene-screened" as a fetus because her parents were "hippies", which you then discover has lead to a congenital heart defect that might make mandated cryostasis a fatal proposition. None of this has much bearing on your mission to recover the AI, but it's a way you can become invested in these people as you continue to pick up snippets of personal information. Of course, it can feel a little disrespectful to pick through all these private files and listen in on confidential tête-à-têtes, especially as you're not sure who may have even survived this incident.

In some ways, I feel a little bad for Tacoma. Not only was it a "second draft", so to speak, of Fullbright's follow-up response to Gone Home - a difficult game to follow, especially after a false start - but their lunch was then thoroughly eaten by Arkane Studios's Prey, released a few months earlier. Not only is Prey a fully-featured FPS game with BioShock/System Shock elements of progressing at your own pace in your preferred manner, but it also included a series of riveting vignettes about the status of its space station's crew and the player's role in tracking down their last known positions, learning personal info and piecing together their narratives from environmental storytelling. I've yet to play it but it sounded like Lucas Pope's Return of the Obra Dinn (released the following year) takes that same structure to its next evolutionary stage, creating a logical puzzle game out of determining the fates of a doomed crew. Tacoma just feels outclassed at every turn.

That isn't to say the game doesn't deliver on its promise of a sci-fi Gone Home equivalent, nor that I wasn't compelled to solve the mystery at its core and thoroughly explore the station for whatever narrative morsels I could find. A good adventure game of this model is predicated on its storytelling quality, of arcs both minor and major, and Tacoma doesn't disappoint in that regard. I can also respect Fullbright's ongoing campaign of adding more LGBTQ representation to the genre as a whole - at least half the station are non-hetero - and how that diversity will only become more prevalent in the future in which the game is set: it's just not inclusivity for the sake of it but a shrewd appraisal of where current social trends might be heading, in much the same way as any decent sci-fi exists to make a statement on the present (and, likewise, Tacoma has plenty to say about the accountability of private corporations and the ongoing difficulties in finding personal and professional fulfillment in a staunchly capitalist system). A fine adventure game, if brief and somewhat star-crossed with everything that surrounded its development and release.

Rating: 4 out of 5.