TOBlue skies, crystal-clear waters, a flotilla with the motto “Welcome to Pleasureland.” It sounds like a dream vacation, but it’s actually a dystopia: the continents lie submerged after the Great Flood, a disease caused by toxic plastic wreaks havoc on all living organisms.
There’s no way to mistake Tides of Tomorrow for anything other than an anxious “cli-fi” film, but its tone is exuberant, cheeky, and irreverent rather than melancholy or horror-laden. The setting is the fictional planet of Elynd, which, according to lead game designer Adrien Poncet, allows him and his colleagues to take liberties with the science and technology they’re portraying. We see one character inhaling “ozen” from a canister, an oxygen-like substance that keeps people alive. Elsewhere, players witness shocking and disturbing imagery, including a massive mass of plastic floating in the air similar to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.
Fans of DigixArt’s previous project, the frontier adventure Road 96, will feel right at home with the surfeit of gameplay challenges in Tides of Tomorrow. You make your way across the ocean of Elynd, encountering pirates, religious cults and deep-sea scrap-fishing vessels, and there’s first-person exploration alongside a sprinkling of minigames and scripted action sequences (including, unsurprisingly, boat-driving sequences, plus, less predictably, the occasional bit of parkour). But Poncet stresses that the game is fundamentally about an exciting, branching narrative. Kill a crime boss or try to escape? The choice is yours: live – or die – by its consequences.
There’s an ambitious new “choose your own adventure” formula that’s already been around for a long time. Playing as a “tidewalker” (name subject to change), you share what Poncet calls an “uncanny bond” with other tidewalkers. They appear to you as ghostly visions, out of time but not out of place. Here’s the rub: These visions aren’t pre-programmed encounters, but other players connected to you over the internet, and they’ve already played out the same events. Think of this as an asynchronous multiplayer system like the ghosts in Elden Ring, only here they tangibly affect your game, perhaps leaving behind a key item like a knife to stab into said unsuspecting kingpin.
You only follow one player at a time and get to know each of them through their decision-making impulses. Who might they be? “A random person on the internet, a friend, or maybe your favorite streamer,” Poncet says.
Quickly, the chain reaction of decisions made by both you and your ephemeral tethered companion begins to pile up. Trying out a game with such fast-paced narrative setups is proving quite a challenge. “(Tides of Tomorrow) is the first game that takes this idea of asynchronous multiplayer narrative to this point,” says Poncet. “We don’t have any plan, any preconceived way of approaching this. It’s uncharted territory.”
Despite the surprising novelty of this component, the lead designer maintains that it speaks to the game’s deeper themes; in fact, the mechanic functions as a carefully considered metaphor. After all, what is it that can navigate the all-encompassing climate crisis, and perhaps even mitigate its worst effects, if not a gigantic collaborative effort involving people spread across vast continents?
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“Tides of Tomorrow asks players questions about our own world,” says Poncet. “But it’s mostly about keeping hope alive in a world where all seems lost and helping each other in a common effort to make things better.”