Tacoma: Earned Endings
In the future, billionaires own outer space. Or, at least, they own the means to create space stations that promise luxury at the expense of the people who work on them. It could be a page from our own future, as the Musks and Bezoses venture further into space technology and away from Earth, but it is already reality in Fullbright’s 2017 sci-fi exploration game Tacoma.
As Amitjyoti “Amy” Ferrier, Venturis Corporation agent, it’s the player’s job to investigate the empty Venturis-owned Lunar Transfer Station “Tacoma” and presumably learn the whereabouts of its evacuated crew. With the help of the station’s AI Odin, Amy pieces together the events of the previous four days, and, as the crew did before her, learns those events were the result of a man-made crisis. The “collision” that shook the station was part of a ploy by the Venturis Corporation to break up the Orbital Workers Union and reduce its human workforce to ultimately reduce costs.
Like Fullbright’s previous game, 2013’s Gone Home, the ending is a bit of a bait and switch. As a member of the Artificial Intelligence Liberation Front Amy’s real job is to retrieve and free Odin. The crew was never at risk during Amy’s investigation; by the time she arrives they had already signaled a transport and evacuated the station. With Odin rescued and the crew alive to testify against the Venturis Corporation, Tacoma reaches its happy conclusion.
But did it earn it?
Exploring the Tacoma station isn’t strictly necessary for completing the game, but doing so rewards information; it’s where the player understands the full extent of Tacoma’s dystopia, where humans are bound to and exploited by megacorporations and protected by only the most tenuous of labor laws. The heart of Tacoma is its crew, and the game’s best moments are driven by the interactions of satisfyingly developed characters.
Paradoxically, the ability to pull off such a bait-and-switch ending requires Odin to enough a crew member be worth saving, while making Odin unnoticeable enough that it, like Amy, is a fly-on-the-wall observer to the crew. In doing so Tacoma shies away from reckoning with the enormity of the crew’s actions.
Everything about Tacoma is bigger than Gone Home: It was a more ambitious story set in a bigger world about more complete characters, and I hoped to see the messy consequences of the crew’s actions ripple, to know that the station’s humans were liberated alongside its AI. I don’t think its ending is bad by any stretch (I genuinely loved this game!) but I wanted it to match the ambition of the rest of the narrative.
