With the August-due Tacoma, Fullbright is moving away from the familiar, homely environments of critically acclaimed Gone Home. Far away, as the Portland, Oregon studio is taking its newest mystery to the stars. On a seemingly abandoned space station, the player is left alone to investigate the fate of the Tacoma's crew, with help from recorded holographic memories, rendered in augmented reality. While it's a radical aesthetic departure from Gone Home, a lot of the lonely atmosphere from Fullbright's first game remains.

And in each, there's a pronounced physical distance between the player and the people who live, or have lived, in the environment they're moving through. Gone Home and Edith Finch are both focused on families, yet the player meets none of these relatives, in each game's present, during their stories. No matter how much you find out about the people that inhabit these worlds, you are still alone within them.

It's not just Fullbright who present their first-person protagonists as loners within a given environment, who isolate them and relay all narrative elements through their perception and impressions alone. From Dear Esther and Everybody's Gone to the Rapture , to Firewatch and most recently What Remains of Edith Finch , so-called "walking simulators" have a noticeable habit of placing their protagonists at the center of a world, of a place, where nobody else can touch them.

You are the only person, the only living person, here. Tacoma, like Gone Home, cuts the player off from direct contact with other characters. Bleak weather surrounded the empty Greenbriar house in Gone Home, obscuring the outside world; and in Tacoma, it's the vastness of space that disconnects your experience from anyone else.

It's worth noting that Zimonja is one of three Fullbright founders who worked on the Minerva's Den DLC for BioShock 2. But while the BioShock games do often keep their protagonists distanced from non-player characters, those who aren't trying to kill them at least, Gone Home and Tacoma remove them entirely. That's a story decision, of course, but it's also a reflection of the technical limitations of a smaller studio, beside a larger, triple-A operation with more staff on hand.

"When it came to Gone Home, other characters were never really on the table, because we knew we weren't capable of it," says Fullbright co-founder Karla Zimonja, when I ask if the studio's breakthrough was always designed with isolation in mind. "But when we think of it, Gone Home was based off of some other aspects of the BioShock series, because the characters that you interact with, that aren't enemies, are usually obstructed from the player."

"Once you have characters in the room with you, there are requirements," Zimonja explains. "Firstly, they have to look acceptable, which can be pretty broad given [the many] styles of character design and execution. If they're literally around you, they have to interact with you, or the developer has to think of a really good reason why they wouldn't. You must be able to speak to them, probably, and how does that happen? Essentially, [adding more characters] is a can of worms—a real big and expensive can of worms."

Ian Dallas is the creative director of What Remains of Edith Finch, developed by Giant Sparrow and released in April 2017. He agrees that placing extra characters into a game like Edith Finch or Gone Home requires an incredible amount of effort—and he experienced this first-hand, when the addition of just a few, brief glimpses of other characters in Edith Finch took a member of the studio a long time to create.

"We had a brilliant animator working for a year to produce the people you see in Edith Finch, and even then we weren't going for realism. But the advantage of the game is that each of its stories is its own universe, so the proportions of the characters don't have to fit perfectly with each other, and they don't. A lot goes into character design, in terms of time and resources, and we wanted to focus on the stories."

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Both Dallas and Zimonja worry that a badly realized character, a poorly animated NPC, can and likely would break the immersion of their games. Nevertheless, there are recognizable figures, at least, in Tacoma—the station's holograms are very clearly human of shape and movement.