I picture the making of Tides of Tomorrow in a lab deep underground, where scientists in white coats scurry around as beakers bubble over with brightly colored art and petri dishes of player decisions cluster together on a counter. After all, the folks who made this game are quite accustomed to narrative experimentation. In Road 96, developer Digixart delivered a tight, character-driven story built around procedurally generated sequences of rest stops along a road trip to a fictional nation’s border.
This design created numerous permutations in the central plot of the game, such as which characters a player encountered, how often they crossed paths, and where they met. The decisions a player made in each of those moments led to a one-of-a-kind journey, full of serendipitous occasions, just as any good road trip should be. In Tides of Tomorrow, Digixart is back with yet another test trial, this time focused on bringing more players along for the ride together.
On the surface, Tides of Tomorrow seems like another story-driven entry in the long line of walking simulators. However, as you bring the game under the microscope, the DNA is fundamentally different. The story-seed system is the catalyst for a unique, bespoke narrative structure that I have not encountered before. In this system, players will follow a code identifier of another real-life player throughout the adventure, witnessing the choices that player made and the ripple effect it creates in the game world. This story seed can be manually entered if a player wants to follow a particular individual or friend; otherwise, the player can select from a list of usernames from people who have played the game previously.
In this way, Tides of Tomorrow hangs its hat on its asynchronous multiplayer design, whereby one player’s decisions during their playthrough impact all the other players who would follow their story seed. While there is the option to follow a bot instead of a real person, that would defeat the point of Digixart’s core mechanic. As we play Tides of Tomorrow, we prepare the world for those who come after us, just as we live in the aftermath of those who came before.
I was the first of my friend group to play Tides of Tomorrow, so I decided to follow an assortment of random strangers (you can change who you follow between levels) as I prepared my story seed for my friends. I chose who to follow based on an even mix of the five character traits: Pro-Mankind, Pro-Nature, Cooperative, Troublemaker, and Survivalist. This allowed me to experience the way the game world dramatically bent to the will of previous players. Across the different islands I visited, I was occasionally received as a hero thanks to the humanitarian efforts of a prior player, yet more often I was ostracized due to the way a player offended the island’s inhabitants.
These different scenarios substantially changed my gameplay on the islands as well, whereby, in good standing, I could reasonably expect an easier time navigating the territory, and the islanders were happy to part with their resources for my benefit. On the other hand, if islanders were troubled by my presence, I could expect that I might have to sneak my way around the island and talk my way out of some tense accusations.
Tides of Tomorrow takes place on an ocean filled with plastic bottles and cartons, dooming the adjacent island civilization to a disease called “plastemia.” This is a gruesome malady in which people slowly turn into plastic husks once the microplastics in their blood reach excessive levels. It is especially tragic when looked at through the lens of the story seed system, in which the game nods to the ways humans treat the planet and pass the consequences of their exploitative behavior along to the next generation.
Despite how sobering the subject matter, the aesthetic of a world where plastic and nature are at war is quite stunning. The bright neon colors of synthetic debris pop against the bright blue sky and deep blue ocean. The apparel on the islands is a weave of organic island material with contemporary avant-garde design flourishes. Everywhere you go, there seems to be more primitive architecture set among the “plastic-punk” reimagining of those spaces. This is not the dark, brooding post-apocalyptic world we have seen in other games; instead, this is the bright, loud pre-apocalyptic world of its own predilection.
The story sees our protagonist, a bodysuit-clad Tidewalker, coming to their senses deep within the polluted ocean. Following the guiding vision of a previous Tidewalker, a real player whom you choose, our hero swims upwards to safety. At the surface, our Tidewalker clambers aboard a rescue ship and encounters Nahe, the first of many recurring characters you will cross paths with throughout the game. Nahe tells us about a prophecy she believes will rid the world of plastemia, but more importantly, she mentions that the collection of Tidewalkers (past, present, and future) has a role to play in this salvation.
After a short conversation, we see another vision of the previous Tidewalker, either taking a vital resource called “ozen” for themselves or passing it along to the next player, which just so happens to be us. We learn that who we chose to follow in the opening of the game had a definitive impact on the resources we now have at our disposal, and what’s more, we can choose to leave that same Ozen (if available) to other players that follow in our footsteps. Thus begins the long procession of pay-it-forward situations.
The ebb and flow of the multiplayer experience is what kept me engaged throughout my 16 hours with Tides of Tomorrow. To witness both the civility and churlishness of other players helped me get to know the broader Tidewalker community, as, like me, they were involuntarily caught in the middle of a grand design to deal with plastemia. I would see echoes of their cooperative actions as they left signs for me to explore certain parts of each island for secrets, or I would stumble upon a cache of goods they left for me to enjoy.
On the other hand, I saw certain Tidewalkers prioritize their own survival by hoarding resources and knowledge for themselves, all too disinterested in passing it down the line. Everywhere I turned, the islanders were telling me about what the previous tidewalker did and how that influenced the people’s impression of me as Tidewalker kindred. Moreover, I knew that my own actions would impact the friends following my playthrough, so I could also choose to leave breadcrumbs that guided them to the most interesting places I had discovered. I could even, as an example, invest some scrap (the island currency) with one of the many Ozen vendors to ensure that my followers were able to buy Ozen at a discounted rate.
Managing your supply of Ozen and scrap is the primary tension throughout your journey in Tides of Tomorrow, and the way this interfaces with the asynchronous multiplayer mechanics is brilliant. Every time you travel to a new location, your health drops two bars on the UI, and it can only be replenished with Ozen. Thus, you constantly need to be consuming Ozen bottles just to survive. At first, Ozen was easy to come by, and so it made my decision to keep Ozen for myself and to leave extras behind for other tidewalkers a very painless, altruistic decision.
However, as I got further into the game, I found it much more difficult to secure it, in part because it became increasingly rarer in the narrative but also because other players stopped leaving me Ozen as well. Naturally, I could not part with this resource whenever I stumbled upon it, as I was on the edge of survival. This led to fascinating, emergent lore across the entire community of Tides of Tomorrow players, whereby some early players were less generous with their resources, which made those who followed them have to hold tighter to their resources and so on and so on down the line of all subsequent players.
Tides of Tomorrow is an incredible social experiment in that regard, where one player’s decisions not only impact their immediate neighbors but also shape the types of decisions those neighbors can make for their neighbors. It’s an artistic way of expressing the truth that human behavior leaves an indelible mark in the world to come.
While I appreciated how choices mattered in the macroeconomic and overarching storyline, I was disenchanted by some of the smaller decisions and gameplay mechanics in between the larger story beats. First of all, I found the writing to be a bit hit-or-miss. Even though I really liked each character design, many still fell victim to generic dialogue and personality tropes. For instance, marauders act like you would expect in every situation, without much dimension or nuance to why they are so callous and violent. Furthermore, parts of the script were very keyword/buzzword heavy, so much so that it made me chuckle to hear every NPC mention Ozen at least a handful of times in passing conversation. It would have made for a great drinking game. For every beautiful line like “We sold the very floor we walked on to pay for Ozen,” there is another line like “Ooh, big door! I bet there is something cool behind it,” which made my roll my eyes.
The other letdown for me was that the mini-games throughout the adventure are so uncompromisingly basic that I wish that the developer had just left them out so that the walking-sim/adventure game elements could shine brighter. The stealth sections are instant-fail if you are caught, with barely any mechanics to avoid detection other than hiding behind objects. If a previous tidewalker got caught hiding under a table, you merely have to avoid hiding under that same table again since the enemies will be suspicious of it. This same situation plays out one too many times.
The boat races and escape sequences are a one-button affair that have all the trappings of an exhilarating sequence but are pigeonholed by their simplicity. Even the few puzzles in the game are as rudimentary as checking your Tidewalker vision to see how the person before you solved the puzzle…and just doing that again. In short, the little interactive moments don’t add much to the experience, and they go so far as to commodify the otherwise fantastic asynchronous multiplayer elements.
