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Fantastic Walking Sim

User Rating: 9 | Tacoma LNX

By shylocksimmonz | Review Date: March 12, 2022

Tacoma feels like a bigger more sci-fi version of Gone Home. I mean that as a compliment. The idea is the same, you’re going around finding out what happened but this time you are doing so by finding logged recordings of events that took place. You can also go through various crew members offices and personal spaces to get to know the people better as well as provide context to some events. The overall story is well done and the only thing I would have changed is one plot point I wished I had an option to do the right thing or go evil on. The characters are fleshed out well and you feel like you get to know about them by the end. The few puzzles in the game are in the form of finding out what passwords are and I liked that many of them could be found through simply exploring. They were often neither too easy or too hard to come by although other times they just flat out give them to you. Part of me wants to criticize the game for not having a list of objectives but to be fair the game didn’t really need one. You go to each area, set up the transfer module to copy AI data and while that copies you explore the area to find logged events and learn more. If you’re taking the time to actually watch the events the transfer will be done long before you’re through. If you’re not exploring then well you’re missing out. The graphics had a clean style to them that made think a little of 70’s or 80’s sci-fi movies. They weren’t mind blowing in detail but they weren’t bad either. The game does have music for some of the events but it was background music that the characters were listening to, there isn’t much of a sound track to the game itself. The silence kind of works for it giving the game a peaceful vibe.

I played Tacoma on Linux. It never crashed on me and I didn’t notice any bugs or glitches. There was a toggle for AO; AA and v-sync. There was an FOV bar but it had no numbers to indicate minimum and maximum. There were 4 other graphics settings. Alt-Tab didn’t work. You can save the game on exit but there is only one save slot. There were prompts to press certain buttons when you could perform certain functions like recovering recordings but they were usually wrong. For instance often it would tell me to press “x” to recover recording but the actual button mapped was “space” not “x”. I hadn’t changed the controls so I don’t know why this was displaying the wrong key. Performance was overall very good but there were a few times where it dropped into very low frame rates like 2 FPS or 7 FPS. These drops only lasted 1-2 seconds and the normal frame rate was 80+ FPS. The game also used a lot of VRAM and had high GPU usage but in my opinion the graphical detail didn’t warrant such high amounts of GPU usage or VRAM.

Game Engine: Unity

Graphics API: OpenGL

Disk Space Used: 11.1 GB

Input Used: Keyboard and mouse

Game Version Played: 2019-12-20 (38295)

Graphics Settings: Highest; AO; AA; and v-sync on; 1920x1080

GPU Usage: 0-100 %

VRAM Usage: 4380-6660 MB

CPU Usage: 16-36 %

RAM Usage: 3.5-4.8 GB

Frame Rate: 2-144 FPS

if you enjoyed games like Gone Home you will probably really like Tacoma. It is like a bigger version of Gone Home with a more fleshed out story. I finished it in 2 hours and feel that it is well worth it’s current price of $25.49 CAD. It had some performance quirks and some of the puzzles could have been a bit harder but overall it was a fantastic game and I enjoyed it a lot.

My System: