There have been a lot of majestically rotating space stations since Stanley Kubrick blasted a Howard Johnson’s into orbit in 1968. For that matter, there have been plenty of suspiciously underpopulated space bases since Leslie Neilson touched down on Altair IV. And although any video game that doesn’t use Aliens as its sole visual reference is a blessing, there’s not exactly a shortage of games with similar source material. Judging from its latest trailer, Tacoma isn’t afraid to wear these influences on its sleeve—in fact, they’re practically tattooed across its forehead.
But the game is being made by Fullbright, the team behind the absolutely extraordinary Gone Home, and that makes it worth paying attention to. (To be completely accurate to the point of boring everyone, it’s being made by most of the team behind Gone Home: One of the the Fullbright Company’s founders split off to form Dim Bulb Games, at which point the company was reborn as simply Fullbright.) Gone Home was described by both fans and detractors as unlike any other game—despite the fact that its premise, exploring a Victorian mansion, was literally the first idea anyone had for a graphic adventure. What made it seem new wasn’t its originality but its meticulous sense of time and place: The game was set on June 7, 1995, in Portland, Oregon, and every detail, from the hand-labeled X-Files tapes to the perfect period design on furniture, magazines, and even movie tickets had a cumulative effect that put players in that precise moment in history. You could see how the game’s characters lived, which went a very long way toward bringing them to life.
So what does that mean for Tacoma? The year 1995 is in living memory, but no one knows what a space station will look like; Fullbright won’t be able to rely on nostalgia or refer to old Sears catalogs to make their world seem real this time around. But if anyone can take the abandoned space station trope and make it fresh, it’s the people who built a multigenerational story of romance triumphing over family tragedy from a pile of classroom notes and Super Nintendo cartridges. Tacoma is coming in spring of 2017 to PCs and Xbox One.
