Tacoma, much akin to its sibling game Gone Home, tells a story of several people in an abandoned setting. Again the plot itself is not really spelled out but rather implied. Just like Gone Home, your character has been given audio logs and props to explore. Unlike many other games the level of detail here is insane. Not only are the props accurate to form but their placement also carries significance as well. All the details of the game form the context in which the story is set in. They also inform us of the characters, their motivations, their fears, and their hopes and dreams. This guide will attempt to break down the information presented in the game; however, because it is so big I will miss something. Do comment below if you have additional information.

And before we begin, may I remind you that this guide is discussing the plot in great detail, and therefore, SPOILER WARNING. Do not read this guide unless you had played the game at least once, or you have no intention of ever doing so. With that in mind, let's begin.

What is the world like in the game? For one thing, country boundaries have changed. It is delibrately left vague which countries merged with what and which countries. But it doesn't seem to have been caused by a conflict but rather a natural evolution. America, for example, had broken up into multiple countries while Europe, Britan, and Russia had formed a sort of super-EU (you can tell this game development started pre-Brexit!). However, there is still freedom of movement and the UN still exists, abiet joined with OPEC to maintain the imporance of capitalism in the game's world. It just seems to have...happened.


Player character Amy is from California

While E.V.'s country leans more towards Canada and Northern USA

And it is entirely possibe that not only Brexit will be reversed, but Russia will join the EU too

A lot of information can be gleaned from a crossword puzzle

For another, the world has become a more open, inclusive, and ethical place. Nobody seems to be concerned about Nat and Bert's marriage and Andrew's family situation (a male partner and son back on Earth) is considered pretty normal. There are cruelty free meat cartoons lying about and there are many references to sustainability. And as said before there seems to be a very open boarder policy considering every single crew member comes from a different country.





But the most obvious difference between the game's world and ours is the almost complelte takeover of capitalism. It seems as if the large corporations had taken over. From the presidency of Elon Musk to the takeover of universities by conglomerates, it seems as if capitalism has truly conquered the world. Cash is king and as someone told E.V., "If it doesn't make dollars, it doesn't make sense." Not merely being content with being stuck on Earth, they have decided to take over space as well utilising the technology of space lifts. Tacoma, of Singapore, is not the only company to have taken over the sector of space holidays. There's stiff competition from Hilton, and Carnival wants to wow clientèle with trips to Jupiter.







From Business Insider Australia[www.businessinsider.com.au]

With continued wage stagnation and increased productivity, the gap between the rich and the poor continue to grow. The working class, for example the crew of Tacoma, are forced to work all year round in the space station whereas there are people who can afford to take an eight-month holiday to Jupiter. You can no longer be wealthy by hard work alone; you need capital and money making assets. It is specifically stated that Venturis owns almost eveything aboard Tacoma (apart from probably personal items of the crew) including all the assets needed to make any relavent money. This indicates a return to an almost feudal society, with companies as the lords and the employees the serfs.

The feature of real life companies in the game indicates the plot is not entirely speculative or fanciful but rather an evolution of current trends. For example, Amazon is featured, but only to explain how the loyalty economy might work in the future. People are expected to go and stick with one company for the rest of their lives, from education till retirement. Without perceived loyalty you cannot pay off your education fees and your job prospects are low. Loyalty is treated like wealth in many ways and it is represented with points. The longer you stay in a company the more points you can accure and the more things you can pay off. It is explicited told several times in the game that the loyalty points are treated like cash. How it came to be that is not completely known, though there is a hint that there was a major currency collapse, something much worse than the 2008 GFC.



That being said, there seems to be very little loyalty on the side of their companies to their employees. Critique left unread, problems ignored, and the fact that they are willing to kill for profit are all proof of their lack of regard for their employees. If there are employees at all. Everyone onboard Tacoma is an independent contractor and each of their positions are tenuous as best. Whether a person keeps a job is based on several factors, such as job performance and probably how other's rate them, judging how important peer reviews are. If this sounds familiar this is the model gig economies companies like Uber runs off. If you leave a company, they do not welcome you back easily, even if you had worked diligently for several years and just wanted to go to another company to study a for a passion project.



That is why unions feature more heavily than one might expect in the text material. It implies the rise of union membership by employees as a reaction of the increasing powers of conglomerates. The union is implied to be very powerful as they did manage to lobby for laws that protect the employees but at the same time reduces the profitability of business, even when it is quite obvious it is the businesses that mainly controls the government. The fact that the businesses has almost, but not quite full control of the world leads to no ends of frustration to people like Venturis CEO Sergio Venturi. On the union side they do not trust the companies. For example, they require correspondances between companies and their employees to be printed out just in case the companies hack electronic correspondances and change evidences.



The conflict between the union, as well as the employees, with the companies is what actually kick-starts the plot.

Keep this message in mind. It is going to be important later.

Compared to AI, humans are very expensive. Humans cannot work 24/7, humans need resources to live, and humans need to be paid. That is why many companies such as Venturis prefer to use AI to run systems and spaceships as opposed to people. Tacoma is a docking station between Earth and their luxury hotels on the moon, a stopover place if you will. Technically, there isn't really a need for people to run the station and one advanced AI, such as ODIN, could look after the station all by himself. In fact, that is what Venturis had initially planned. They wanted to stop employing people to manage their Lunar Bungalows from 29th Feburary 2058 in order to decrease costs. Ventries even lobbied for law (called euphemistically The Worker's Safety Act) to be passed to prevent people from working in space.

However, the union was powerful enough to not only defeat the bill, but also put mandates that people have to be employed in space stations. They even put a minimum requirement of people employed at a space station of a given size, to prevent loneliness. Apparently six was the minimum size for the size of the Tacoma ship, so that's why there is only six crew members.

To celebrate, they put in a holiday, called Obsolescence Day, on the day humans were supposed to stop working in space (the last day of February). This law was losing Venturis money so they had to find a way to defeat it and put their bill in its place. Hence the plan to kill Tacoma's crew and to make it look like it was caused by human error. The fact that they decided to do it on Obsolescence Day is to put the point across further.




Just how the company is going to have a fully automated space station within a year when it is clearly illegal to do so is one half of the plot.

AI still play a pivotal role in the ship as well as the story as advisor and caretakers. Sometimes it seems they are giving orders, such as during the Obsolescence Day party in which it was ODIN who planned everything, even which cake recipe to use. It is ODIN who makes sure the ship stays in orbit, remembers little details for crew such as locker numbers, and monitors the crew in general for Venturis. This includes recording crewmembers if they are in the shower, for example. This therefore makes ODIN a fitting name for the AI, as Odin was the All-Seeing Father of Norse mythology.




Not much is known about ODIN. There are hints about his origins as well as his capabilities. He is by far the oldest character in the game, stated to be one of the first AI and around a century old. He is programmed with the ability to learn and evolve as well as form complex relationships. One such relationship that shines particular well is the one with the ship's doctor Sareh, which will be explored more in depth later. It is also hinted that he can grow beyond his initial programming, as he managed to betray his masters, the Venturis Corporation, indirectly, without breaking his directives. It is he that gives the crew information and the tools they need to survive. It is also him that incriminated his masters by giving evidence of their plan. It is this action that showed not only his sentience, but also his morals and compassion, and that has lead him to be recognised as a living AI by the people who would eventually rescue him, the AI Liberation Front.


ODIN (the pyramid) talking with Sareh (right)

ODIN is a very advanced AI

Because of the profit-driven nature of companies, it is no surprise that Venturis Earth-side would have AI's too. The main one seems to be JUNO. Even less is known about JUNO, except she seems to be the AI based in Venturis's headquaters in Singapore, and like ODIN, may be sentient. The CEO seems to treat JUNO as his personal assistant as it is he that asks her what to do in order to get the bill passed. It is JUNO who comes up with the plan to kill the Tacoma Crew and it is her that contacts you with final instructions, with the implication she had taken over the company.






A breakdown of Venturis's plan to kill the Tacoma crew

One reason why Sergio Venturi would stoop so low morally is because his tenure as CEO has become very tenuous. The failure of the Orbital Worker Safety act and in turn the Venturis Belt has caused many people to lose confidence in him. Coupled with the promise that he will get the Belt up and going again in 2088 has made him extremely desperate.

It is unknown whether he would have killed the crew of Tacoma anyway if he was not in such a dire situation; however, the surprise expressed by Sareh of the plan as well as the media fallout afterwards indicated that employee killing is considered in the game's world to not only be unpresedented but immoral. Money may mean almost everything, but life is still considered priceless by most.



The name JUNO itself is curious as it could have several meanings. Juno was the queen of the Greek pantheon and here JUNO is the head AI of Ventris. It could also be a shout-out to Assassin's Creed with their Juno as the main antagonist; however, it has yet to be confirmed. It is interesting to note that in the end, AI came to dominate Venturis not because of force but because of complacency. It is the people that own Venturis, satisfied that their AI could do a better job than any human could ever do, has decided to allow AI to take over. This is despite several indications some of their AI's are not as good as they claim it to be. It is people that has declared people obsolete, not the robots.


Thank goodness JUNO is not governing a country

But if there was a character in the game that is aware of the potential failings of AI, it would be Dr Sareh Hasmadi. Prior to her posting at Tacoma she had accidently killed one of her patients: a social media star JJ Pratt. During the court hearing afterwards she testified that AI HEKA had also made a huge mistake in the medicine dosage but that was denied by Venturis.


Towards the end of the game you see the test results of the AI showing just how inferior it was compared to ODIN. You also get to see that Ventrius had ignored HEKA's failings in an email. Yet Venturis, confident in their technologies, instead of improving their AI, Venturis decided to 'punish' Sareh by sending to a backwater job at Tacoma for pointing out the flaws in HEKA.




This goes a long way to explain Sareh's state of mind on the day of the disaster. Unjustly Punished by her superiors and still guilty over the death of one of her patients, she decides to withdrawal, and she withdrawals hard. Prior to the disaster she does not really interact with anyone apart from Andrew, E.V., and ODIN. Her withdrawal from the crew does seem to generate some concern and there is a subtle hint that Natali had tried to hook her up.



A nice foreshadwing as to how Sareh ends up saving ODIN.

It does not help that she seems to be suffering from depression, judging from the medication she is taking, and that she is a perfectionist, based on her intense exercise goals and high expectations of her own body. Even when most of the crew are in the communal kitchen area preparing for Obsolescence Day, she decides to hide away around a corner playing pool. ODIN seems to be her favourite compansion on the ship as she could be seen talking to him in almost all the scenes she is in. She even has a conversation withi ODIN stating there seems to be nobody on the ship she could talk to. Yet she stays on Tacoma because of her cripping student loans with Venturis despite opportunities elsewhere.



Due to her mental health issues and her propensity to suffer from panic attacks, plenty of things in Sareh's room are geared towards mindfulness. The music she plays are calming, she has I-Ching tucked under a table, and she has a digital yoga mat. Yet when she suffers, she suffers alone. The medications she takes is hidden away. There is no evidence she has seen a councillor. And when she has a panic attack, she makes sure she panics where people cannot see her. She obsesses over the past as she scrolls through the social media feed of the patient she thought she killed years after the event. Only ODIN knows about this and Sareh seems to be only comfortable talking to ODIN about her panic attacks. This is probably because she wants to perceived as a sane and well put together person as opposed to the nervous wreck she really is. This is part of her personality as a perfectionist. To his credit ODIN does not seem to have told anyone else about Sareh's mental state and even helps her out of panic attacks.



The explosion of the oxygen tanks changes Sareh. When before she would stay on the fringes, she took charge. This became especially true when one by one each crewmember became incompaciated, whether it was because they were in cryo or becuase they were injured. She find the strength to make hard decisions, such as not telling Natali that she might die in cryo due to heart murmur so that Natali might die painlessly as opposed to suffocation.

Ultimately, it was Sareh that saves the day by being the one to contact the Carnival ship that was passing by and the one who found out about Venturis's plan to kill the crew. She even becomes the one to contact Cluey Dog aka Hassian, the H that sends Amy to rescue ODIN from being wiped by Venturis.

This is a character motivated by guilt and the determination not to allow history to repeat itself. By directly going against Venturis she frees herself of her past. She has determined that she would no longer listen to the opinion of her bosses, continue being loyal to a company that has wronged her, and act for herself.

If Sareh is motivated by guilt, then Andrew Dagyab is motivated by stubbonness and pride. Whether it was the determination to win (even when he keeps on losing), or finding funds to send his son Nicolas to university, or getting plants to grow, Andew will just keep on trying until he finally succeeds.This stubboness and pride cause rifts between him and his family as he is determined to stay on Tacoma to pay for his son's university tuition, even when they really want him home and they could take up offers of charity. When it comes to crew interactions it can be quite painful working with him if he does not agree with you. He is the last to agree to the plan and the most reluctant to go into cryo.



Something tells me Undertale is more his type of game


Long range postings are always the hardest on the people who love you the most




Part of his stubborness is that he feels underappreciated. He was surprised at the lack of uptake of his hard-won orchids (only a tenacious fool willt try to grow orchids in winter) and he feels frustrated that his family does not appreciate how hard his is working for them. Feeding into that frustration is the apparent lack of appreciation of his struggles in life. In 2058 he and his family had survived a Tibetian massacre (caused by China in the future) but his beloved grandmother died. Andrew wants a holiday to commemorate the massacre, as one might have a day to remember lost soldiers.




This rigid approach to life has not made him many friends and he seems closest on board to Sareh. Both share a sense of duty to the people they care for and both are very internally conflicted.

When your only best friend takes pity on you

But his biggest motivations are his family. All his recordings feature his family in some form, whether it is talking to his teenage son or a picture of his family on screen or a funeral commemoration of his grandma stuck to the wall or books on how to raise a successful child on his shelf. His family influences almost his every decision and they are very important to him. In fact, he might feel underappreciated because deep inside, he feels inadequate and that he can always do more for them. It is quite obvious his family loves them in turn, from his son following in his father's footsteps to go to Amazon university, to the cheeky pranks, to their constant communication with each other.


What is so signifcent about this book? Andew is born in 2046, Year of the Tiger. And assuming his son is 18, Nicholas is born in 2070 and is another Tiger baby. So, was the book to gain insights about himself, his son, or both?



He got his love for plants from his grandmother


And in turn, his son inherited his artistic skills



Cheesy Chistmas photos still exist, apparently. From left, Andrew, Nicholas, Marc.

It took the explosion of Tacoma for him to realise how important family is to him. Once he realises he could die, he does everything in his power to make sure he will see them again. This contrasts greatly with his previous decision to stay onbard the ship to make more money as opposed to spending more time Earthside with his family and having a less lucrative job. For him, he realises that while his family's finances are important, they are not as important as spending time together and being a family.

Out of the crew he has the most to lose if the plan to get off the ship does not work. This is why he is so relunctant to go with the plan as there is a chance that he might die and not see his family again. This fear is expressed in the farewell message he gave to ODIN should the plan not work. He also starts appreciating the crew more. The disaster makes him realise just how closed-minded he was to the other crew and makes him realise that he is appreciated by the crew, and he can finally let his feelings of inadequancy go.

Family and love is also important to Clive Siddiqi, but in completely different ways. For Clive, it is family pride, and the beginings of romantic love, that drive the actions in the game.

It is very obvious that Clive comes from a privileged background. From his Received Pronouncation accent to his senior position onboard Tacoma and his aloof attitude, Clive doesn't seem to fit in. He seems more suited to a more elite position such as managing a larger ship, and he knows it. Yet no matter how hard he tries, he can't seem to get out of the backwaters of Tacoma.




As said before, companies expect loyalty without being loyal in return. Your loyalty is apparently more important than your qualifications, apparently.

Clive is an opportunist in a world where you are supposed to sit still. He jumps from company to company when there is a bigger opportunity to be had and now he is paying the price. Now at the age of 45, his career is going nowhere. He is disappointed in himself and he thinks he is a disappointment to his family, especially his mother. After all, when your mother is a director of a prestigious art gallery, surely you can do better than managing five other people onboard a stopover point?



The mother-son relation may be colder than what most people are used to, but it is not without affection

This becomes important later


It shows how old fashioned the Siddiqi family is when you write your mother a letter when everyone else has moved onto more modern means.

Being the washed up family embarrassment with a job he is overqualified for takes a toll on Clive's mental health. For one thing, he is continuously living in the past. He is always talking to an old collegue of his from his Carnival days. He has his old trophies from school in his bedroom. He is trying to be as fit as he was back in his university days. And he is also an alcoholic.




Only the hardest of drinkers will have three bottles of hard liquor opened at the same time!

He hides his woes behind cheerful sarcasm. After all, he is a British Gentleman, and he must no matter how dire the situation, hide his pain behind a Stiff Upper Lip.


Not too sure you want to do that, Clive


Snarking at a Hal expry might not be the best of ideas

As you can see on the botton right hand corner quote, his demeanour can get onto people's nerves

His snark and apparent overconfidence also hides his insecurities. He has a crush on E.V. but does not quite know how to express it. His advances are extremely tentative, such as a nice friendly tea party with great-grandmother's silver set.



Told you a previous image would become important

Too shy to even give a gift

The explosion changes all that. It became the catalyst for him to finally take control of his life and become the risk taker he once was in his youth.He even decides to go into Cryo with E.V. so they would not spend a moment apart.




However, as Clive is one of the first to go into cryo, he is the one with the smallest impact of the overall story. Rather, his role in the story is to provide background information that also informs the player of the factors that affect the other characters' decision. His story is also a reflection of the younger generations as we job hop when new opportunies arise[news.gallup.com]. In many ways he is like a Millennial: lost, insecure, and hides his problems behind humour and overconfidence. He is overqualified for his unglamourous job. He has not achieved many of the things he wants to achieve. HIs mid-life crisis has him live in the past. He is a depressing prediction for many of us as we join the rat race. There will be losers, and Clive is one of them.

From the begining Evelyn Victoria 'E.V.' St James is a bag of contradictions. She is an active union member and an employee of a company dead set to destroying them. She is living on a spaceship that probably caused her beloved sister's death. Her optimistic exterior masks her pessimistic interior. If anything, her existance shows just how difficult life can be for a normal worker in the game's world, in which you have to behave in a certain way just to survive.

The report is either positive, or she is fired


Top left QR code reads, "Cascadia-First Nations is proud to be the strongest supporter of orbital worker rights."

E.V. and her sister Karyn, at an Union ball



Makes you wonder, doesn't it?

As the administrator, she is in many ways the captain of the ship. She has to make sure everyone is safe and follows the rules. As she constantly reminds people.


Nevertheless, there are small indications she is not as strict or as loyal to Venturis as one might suspect to get such an important position, to the displeasure of the company.

To be fair, the CEO did try to kill them

Technically part her job is try to prevent these things from happening

These are her small ways of rebelling, to poke at the company she has good reason to hate. Yet she still does her job and she does put up pretences of job satisfaction. After all, you need to work to live.

The good news? All their contracts are renewed.

Otherwise it is easy to see why Clive had fallen for her. She is a smart and capable leader and she is charismatic enough to get the crew to agree to, by all intents and purpose, a crazy and risky plan.

E.V.'s fondness for famous female authors extends to her cat's name Margaret Catwood.



Somehow, she made everyone agree to a rescue plan so crazy even the people who came up with it are not too sure if it would work

But once the disaster happens, all pretences are off. Only then does she truly reveal what she thinks of the company, and her chances of survival. She is by no means loyal to the company then.





But if she is loyal to anyone, she is certainly loyal to the members of her crew, being the first, alongside Clive, to willing put herself into cryo to conserve oxygen. This unwittingly ends up being an act of defiance as she is helping to thwart Venturis's plan to kill them all. She will not allow the company to take any more lives.

Roberta Williams and Natali Kuroshenko are a package deal. Roberta is a mechanical engineer, and deals with the physical maintainence of the ship. Natali is a network specialists, and conditions ODIN to make sure he works properly. They work with the two sides of the maintainance for the ship, and are almost always seen together. Unlike Andrew and Marc, who have to deal with the emotional strains of a long distance relationship, Roberta and Natali have decided to exercise their full conjugal rights and get posted together. This, as it turns out, is also not without their problems.


No, Venturis did not expect a married couple to get posted together, Hence the DIY bed.

What do you do when you want to be posted with your spouse, but you are also holding them back?

Roberta is by apparence a butch lesbian: large, muscular, and with a short haircut. She is an outdoorsy gal with hunting trophies covering her workspace. As a mechanical engineer she has a very masculine job that surrounds her with machinery and tools all day. To put the point further she does not have an office; she has a workshop. Not a big surprise considering she came from what was originally Texas,





Rosie? Is that you?

This does a very good job of hiding her secret feminine talent: art. Her skills are on par with Andrew's, and probably even better. It is a skills she wants to improve on; however she cannot afford to yet. Hence her far-flung job onboard Tacoma: it is probably the highest paying job she could get so she could save up. And just like Andrew, she is a victim of the loyalty based economy.





Not many can afford to study for pleasure. You now go to university for job training.

it is a testament to her love and loyalty that Natali stays with her wife on a job she is evidently overqualified for. Just like Clive, she feels frustrated at her job, but her reasons are different. She feels restricted and unused to working for a highly structured company with many rules and secrets.



It is implied that she used to a more unrestricted envionment of Tangiers. Tangiers in turn is seen as a more 'hipster' company in comparison to Venturis. She has maintained links with one of their employees in particular, Hassan aka Cluey Dog.



This was hidden in her room

Her liberal views are probably due to her upbringing by her admittedly 'hippie' parents. They had refused to genetically screen her for diseases, for example.




Because of this Natali ended up getting heart murmur, which lead to her hatred of any physical activity and her high risk of death going to cryo.



Bert does have a point

Natali is an interesting character in that she unknowingly help set up the rescue plan months in advance. She is the reason, for example, of why Odin managed to become indepdendant enough to rebel against his masters (without breaking his directives, of course). She is also the one to give Sareh Hassan's contact details. And of course that lead to the rescue of ODIN by Tangiers Orbital.



Even without their prior actions Roberta and Natali are the most proactive in their efforts to save the lives of the crew. While the others are in denial or resigned to the fact that Venturis are not going to rescue them, the two of them immediately came up with a plan to go down to the moon and rescue themselves. This is probably because they are the only ones that can. While the others are more skilled in looking after people, these two specialise in machinery and ship maintainence.



But it is also interesting to note their attitudes to life. It is one of defiance and of fierce determination, to break the mould and be whoever they want. They will be stationed together in space, even when it means they need to build a bed because nobody expects a couple onboard. They will break gender stereotypes because of what they are passionate about and want to do in life. They are problem solvers, and will not wait for others to break down barriers for them. And they absolutely will not bow down to the ill-will of their employers.

Amy is a bit of a mysterious figure. We have a name, a face, a voice, and an organisation she is aligned to, but nothing else. She is akin to Kate from Gone Home, an almost featureless protagonist we are supposed to project our will on. She is supposed to represent us, the player. Hence her role as a passive note taker, the detective sent to investigate the scene of the crime. But before we begin, I must emphasise that almost everything we know about Amy may be faked.

What we definitely know about Amy is only delivered at the end of the game, when she can now afford to take off her mask and show her true identity.
Relavent section begins at 14:25

Clues of Amy's faked identity is present from the very start. For one she travels in a ship with a jury-rigged travelling box for ODIN. Which would be considered a little odd if she is supposed to deliver a sophisticated piece of hardware for a large company.




Hello Hassan

And there is her ID card.


Scanning the bottom middle QR code reads: Lembaga Pelesenan Orbital is not responsible for the issuance of this document.



So somehow, Hassan and Amy from Tangiers Orbital managed to steal Venturis's AI right under their nose by faking Amy's true allegance. Which begs the question: who are Tangiers? What is their role in the game?

Tangiers, at least compared to the other companies in the game, are the smaller, more liberal, and definitely rebellious party of the game. Think of Greenpeace or Amnesty International, but in space. They have views that are not commonly held by the larger coporations, such as holding AI as conscious, independent beings. Their goal seems to be to liberate AI's from their masters, shelter employees from corrupt employers, and spread any word of wrongdoings of businesses.




However, because of their charity status, they are often low on resources needed to achieve their goals. Because of this their methods are more covert. There is Amy, who pretended to be someone she is not to land a job retrieving ODIN. But there is also Natali. She used to live on their ships but due to lack of money she had to work for Venturis instead. Her talent as an AI conditioner places her within range of many AI's Tangiers wants to liberate, making her the perfect mole.

And that is why Venturis will not allow you near ODIN's hardware

When they are not liberating AI they have other odd hobbies that mark out their liberal status. Such as zero-G gardens. Or coming up with funny nicknames, such as Cluey Dog.



But that is all we know about them. Which is a bit shocking, actually. We spend the whole game with all details laid bare and suddenly we stumble upon a group in which we know next to nothing about. Whereas with the crew of Tacoma we get to know almost everything: their family, their habits (such as who smokes and who doesn't) and we even get to see someone shower. Heck, in one bedroom we even get a hint of sexual preferences. It becomes a critique against the invasion of privacy. Even when we claim we have nothing to hide, we always have something we want to keep private: our shortcomings, our secret pleasures, our exclusive worlds between loved ones. Not everything had to be laid bare. Maybe we should keep it this way, and maybe we don't need to know everything about everyone. Maybe we should keep Amy's identity a secret.

The story does not end when the Tacoma crew is evacuated. Just as they are hints to the past, there are clues to the future. There are plenty of questions that needs to be answered:

• News of the attempted killing will definitely not sit well with the shareholders of Venturis. No doubt the share prices, low as it already is, will plummet even lower. CEO Sergio Ventuli will have to resign, and it is possible that Venturis will become bankrupt. Which begs the question: what will happen to Venturis?
  
  • Are the accured Venturis loyalty now usless?
    
  • Will Venturis be bought out? If so, what will happen to the employees? The AI?
    
  • Marc's parents can pay for Nicolas's university, but what about Andrew's Venturis lunar bungalow he bought for the family? Is it completely worthless now?
    
  • How will Roberta pay for her art schooling?
    
  • No doubt all of them will need to find a new job now. Problem is, who will hire them now? This question is especially pertinent for Clive, who went for the Tacoma job specificially to get job experience and back on the job ladder. If Venturis fires him, or makes him redundant, who will hire him now?
    
  • If it is exposed that Sareh went against company policy and illegally accessed ODIN's AI compartment, what will happen to her prospects? Sure, it was done out of self defense, but this would indicate her rebellious spirit, and therefore unemployability. She might end up being a Tangiers operative because her values align pretty closely with them.
• Let's be honest, what are the possibilities the group will ever go to Jupiter? They have not paid for it, will probably never be able to afford it, and it isn't likely there will be jobs for them. What might happen to them? Most likely they will be sent off the ship on the next avaliable shuttle to go back to Earth but by the off chance they have to say onboard, this is what they might do:
  
  • Clive might, might, if he is very lucky, able to regain his job at Carnival. It will be a very junior position, but he does have extensive experience. He is a very valuable resource, and they may as well make good use of it. Furthermore, he does have a history with them. Especially as the captain of the ship is a close friend of his.
    
  • The rest of the crew might be given small jobs with the things they are specialised in. It is not likely they will be paid beyond room and board.
    
  • If Carnival felt particularly magnanimous, they might allow the crew to stay onboard as just celebrities and to help boost their PR. But would the crew ever agree to that?
• Once they return back on Earth, what will they do? Will they sue Venturis? It is possible that by the time they return home, a case by the Union against them will have gone underway. If there is a leader in that case it will be E.V. She is the one with the strongest union ties, and she has experience with cases such as these before. However, there is also the question of whether it is worth suing what will be left of Venturis.
  
• Will the crew remain friends for the rest of their lives? After all, they had worked in close quaters for over a year and they had all survived a disaster together. Will they try and be posted together in future jobs? I have a feeling they would come together once a year, on Obselecence day, to have dinner together, drink some wine, and reminisce the day they all almost died.

• Relationships onboard Tacoma is partially dependent on how close people's offices are. Crews that share a wing of the ship develop the closest relationships. This makes sense, as the closer the offices are the more likely the people will have contact with each other.
  
• Scuff marks indicate the areas with the heaviest foot traffic
  
• Bedrooms are a goldmine of information.
  
  • Sareh is a Muslim and loves chocolate.
    
  • Andrew is generally obssessed with plants. And Shakespare.
    
  • Clive is from London but somehow got good at American football.
    
  • E.V. can play the guitar and loves reading classic literature
    
  • Roberta and Natali are messy people. Very messy people. Their rooms are hands down the most disorganised.
• Tacoma has seasons. It is based on the Northern Hemisphere.
  
• Zero-G often make people sick, judging by all the vomit bags floating around.
  
• The atmosphere onboard is very dry, hence the moisterisers and lip balms everywhere.
  
• It is almost impossible to have a fire onboard Tacoma. From induction cookers to smokeless cigarettes, everthing has done to prevent a naked flame. Not a surprise considering how fire is one of the biggest risks in an limited and oxygenated envionment.
  
• All the QR codes are scannable and some provide extra information.

It takes more than one mind to fully break down the story of Tacoma. I am grateful for these creators for giving me insights and ideas for this guide.

Tacoma (spoilers) by Errant Signal

Tacoma Gameplay Walkthrough And Ending Explained by One Angry Gamer[www.oneangrygamer.net]

The Paste Magazine section on Tacoma[www.pastemagazine.com]

Missing In Action: The Absent Crew Of Tacoma Space Station by Kimberley Wallace[www.gameinformer.com]