"Environmental storytelling totally remains" in Tacoma

The Fullbright Company brought us Gone Home in 2013, a game that used exploration and environmental storytelling to weave a mysterious tale, and we talked to the developer's co-founder Karla Zimonja at E3 about their latest game Tacoma.

During our talk we asked whether the same approach to environmental storytelling would be taken in this game as was deployed in Gone home, and Zimonja said: "We definitely are still very interested in showing what people's lives are like, so yeah, a lot of that. Environmental storytelling totally remains."

When we asked about the different coloured characters in the game, Zimonja explained that this was in order to keep track of all the different people on the ship. "We wanted you to notice the characters and pay attention to what they're doing and be able to track them easily as they move around you, because there's like six people, they're going about their business," she said. "If you are confused about which one is which, that's not great, so we wanted to make it as clear as we could. So even for people who are colourblind and can't perceive all those colours we have, there's department logos on their backs and we have nametags so that it's as easy as possible to keep track of the characters."

"They play scenes around you and you can follow them and watch where they go and come back and meet up and split off again and you can rewind and fastforward and you have a lot of control over the scene. It's cool," she continued.

Do you think Tacoma can top Gone Home?