Tacoma E3 2016 Preview Shows a Vibrant Interactive Sci-Fi Story

Fullbright games brought Tacoma to E3 2016, with Steve Gaynor and Karla Zimonja, the co-founders of the studio personally presenting the game behind closed doors. The follow up to their successful game Gone Home, however, is something wholly new that still honors their unique storytelling ability.

The Tacoma is a Lunar Transfer station, built similarly to the one in 2001. It's run by a crew of six, plus an AI called Odin. You play as Amy Ferrier, a contractor called into the station after a malfunction that evacuates the crew. Ferrier is meant to retrieve the AI and return it to the Venturis Corporation. While this may sound like a horror game, thanks to the tropes of a lone explorer on a space station, Gaynor and Zimonja assure fans that it'll be something different; sure, there are some of those inherent moments of suspense, but this isn't a "jump scare" horror game by any means.

The closed door demo started with Amy linking with an AR device, signing into Odin and entering the station – as she enters, Odin starts to glitch, and that means some aspects aren't working. As you find fragments of recoverable data, you piece together the story of the Tacoma, its crew, and what's gone wrong.

After taking a lift into a gravitized environment, she explores the crew module, which they took great care in creating as something that would actually exist. While your job is to recover the AI data, your exploration of crew data will flesh out the story.

"Like Gone Home, we wanted to give players access to every detail of the story," Gaynor said. "Since AR is an interactive medium, we are able to pause the timeline, fast forward, and rewind, so you can experience everything."

Gone Home was meant to be a "solitary experience," but Tacoma is meant to involve the player more in the events that happened. The events will often diverge and re-converge. "It's a story about people, about six people thrown into a situation that can pull them together, or pull them apart." Zimonja teased somewhat ominously. At that point in the demo, we find out the air supply ruptures on the station, and that's what you're really there to investigate.

The story will take you through the whole space station, but how you explore each area, and reveal the secrets of the station is up to you. Zimonja told Comicbook.com that it's a "chunkishly linear" story with major chunks broken into acts, but allowing for non-linear exploration of each act individually. "We didn't want a player to take a wrong turn and end up in the last chapter of the book," Gaynor added, underlying the importance of story in the game. It's a multi-threaded story that unfolds in pieces, as you witness a (formerly) living world, which Gaynor likened to "Sleep No More," an interactive theatrical experience in New York.

Tacoma hits Xbox One and Windows, Mac, and Linux PCs in 2017.