Tacoma: deserted space station open to explorers from August 2
Ground control to AI Odin
Your invitation to board the ghost party spaceboat exploration game, Tacoma [official site], has been issued: the game launches on August 2nd. Well, I say party spaceboat. There is a party, but it's just one element of the spectal past you can investigate as you piece together what happened as Tacoma Station's crew faced calamity. Here's the launch date trailer which offers some more peeks at life in 2088 aboard the station:
I had some hands-on time with Tacoma during GDC earlier this year and was really taken with the game - both in the attention to detail when it came to the objects and environments and with the way you explored the narrative, scrubbing backwards and forwards in time as you moved around a scene following different participants.
This is from the preview I put together at the time:
Tacoma takes Gone Home’s object-based narrative exploration and marries it with recordings of life aboard the titular space station in the days before a massive malfunction. You can thus pick through crew data, personal items and environmental bits and pieces as well as watching the inhabitants’ lives play out in real time sections as human-shaped holograms move around the world. If you want to hear and see different parts of a recording (you’ll need to in order to access some areas or hear what other people are talking about ) you can scrub backwards and forwards as you wander the area. It’s like having the remote control for a miniature Punchdrunk performance of something like The Drowned Man or Sleep No More.
The price is set to be £14.99 but there's a pre-order incentive of 10% off which brings things down to £13.49 on GOG and Steam. You know how we feel about pre-orders so I'll not repeat the lecture!