Portland-based Fullbright made a name for itself with its “walking simulator” story-focused game Gone Home, which followed the story of a girl in the mid 1990s returning home from college to find her family missing and the house in disarray. There were no enemies to kill, or really any danger of any kind. Instead, the player simply explored the home and attempted to piece together what happened based on a series of journals, cassette tapes, newspapers, and other odds and ends.

While the slow-paced, low stakes gameplay of Gone Home was not for everybody, the game was praised by fans and critics for its detailed setting and clever storytelling. Fullbright’s upcoming game Tacoma will be a similar exploration-based storytelling game, this time set in an abandoned space station “200,000 miles from Earth.”

After the success of Gone Home, Fullbright has a lot of expectations  to live up to, but lead designer Steven Gaynor isn’t too concerned about the media coverage his team has been getting, which included a cover story in GameInformer.

“I feel fortunate that myself and the others on my team have all worked on big games before and have at least been in the splash damage radius of big press pushes for things like BioShock 2 and Infinite, or Dishonored,” Gayner told GamesIndustry.biz. “We still have to do a good job and deliver on the promise, but having had a lot of long term exposure to that realm before makes it feel a lot less viscerally terrifying. A lot of the reason for that being scary is that it’s an unknown. ‘What happens if it doesn’t do well, if we don’t live up to it?’ ”

“So you have to do well, you have to ship the thing, you definitely have to think in terms of looking at the game from an outside perspective,” he continued. “You’re signing up to have to do a good job at what you’ve set up people’s expectations for, and I guess that’s where something like No Man’s Sky might be more daunting: people are really excited for it, but they don’t quite know what it is.”

Tacoma is set to release sometime next year.

Screenshot via Fullbright | YouTube