Despite never letting you interact with another human, Tacoma is an almost unrivalled success when it comes to emotional storytelling and facilitating a true feeling of empathy for characters in games. Part sci-fi and part immersive character drama, this deep and affecting narrative is presented through a smart augmented reality mechanic that lets players sleuth through the story at their own pace.

It's the year 2088 and players take the role of Amy Ferrier, who's been contracted by a big space-tech corporation to retrieve some sensitive data from evacuated space station Tacoma which was, until very recently, home to a diverse crew of six specialists and one omnipotent AI. Of course pulling all the data from such a highly automated and surveilled facility takes time, so while you wait for the transfers to complete at each main junction you're free to look around.

The constantly rotating, intermittently sun-filled station is beautiful to explore and feels believably lived in, with every surface, drawer and room containing something to read or examine that might give you an insight into the crew's lives. Tacoma is from the studio that previously developed the seminal narrative exploration game Gone Home, and the process of gradually building an idea of the characters based on the placement of their belongings and the letters and notes you read feels very similar. But an added layer of storytelling takes this game to a new level.

While a vaguely-defined event has caused the team to exit Tacoma and has ostensibly locked the facility down, aspects of its augmented reality surveillance systems are still active. This means that in many areas you can activate AR recordings of the crew — watching them interact and listening to their conversations as though you were an invisible ghost among them — to slowly build an understanding of their lives together what happened aboard the station.

Importantly you can continue to move around, and even pause, rewind and fast-forward the scenes as you go. So you might choose to follow one character from start to finish, rewind and pick a new character, or you might choose to watch the part where the whole group are hanging out in a common area together, then follow each one back to see how they got there. Careful attention is rewarded, as examining a character while they access their personal AR desktops gives you a chance to peer into their private data, letting you read their messages to loved ones and each other.

Being able to see and hear the characters move around and interact — even if they are nothing more than a voice and a colour-coded, animated body shape — breathes even more life into the abandoned rooms of the space station, and makes the task of finding out everything you can about these people and their relationships all the more exciting.

It helps that the direction and performances of the AR recordings are outstanding and nuanced, putting a great deal of trust in the viewer to play their part in teasing out the story. Two characters briefly holding hands can carry significant emotional weight, but if you're looking the wrong way at the wrong time or paying attention to a different set of characters in a different room, you could miss it. You might spot a character shooting an innocuous glance out a window to the rest of the group, but if you replay the scene from the lone person's perspective you'll hear the conversation they're having with the AI that gives a new context to the entire scene.

The same is true of the written material and environmental stories you find when examining Tacoma's various rooms. Some details are purely to add a sense of a realistic home environment, like when you find the paper cut-out of a letter O in one of the toilets, and realise it's fallen off a nearby wall and been transferred in here on somebody's shoe. But other details are vital to a full understanding the characters' lives and motivations, and some — like keys and pin codes — can even lead you to clues and information the crew preferred to keep away from public view.

The result is a story where you're rewarded for digging. Players breezing through the game might pick up on some ideas about the politics and realities of the wider setting, or might get an inkling of how a character's dealing with a tragedy from their past, but the more details you can soak up the more powerful the narrative becomes as it spirals towards its conclusion.

The whole thing is wrapped in an intriguingly dark near-future setting, although some of the broader themes — including a strong critique on consumerism and corporate culture, as well as the ethics of artificial intelligence — have to be gleaned from emails and pamphlets you find around the place and can be missed entirely, which is a shame given that missing them could rob the story's powerful conclusion of some of its impact. It's hard to argue the system isn't successful in getting its point across though, especially when you realise that every interaction you have with the crew comes via a system thatmonitors them constantly and thoroughly, turning their every word, movement, text conversation and bathroom break into the property of the Venturis Corporation.

Though the game only takes a few hours to play through, the multiple layers of story — which each unlock additional meaning in the others once uncovered — make for a groundbreaking narrative system unlike anything else. But more impressive is the emotional impact of the stories themselves, not just the tale of a crisis aboard a space station and the perils of corporate-controlled AI, but the intertwining stories of six people's lives, loves and losses.

Tacoma is out now on Xbox One (reviewed) and PC.