Tides of Tomorrow Review

Tides of Tomorrow is a story-rich first-person adventure game taking place in a world almost destroyed by global flood and plastic pollution. This is a title in which your choices matter, but there’s a twist: you’re not just impacting the game world — other players are affected by your decisions.

The story starts with a very simple premise: the entire planet, humans, plants, and animals, are wrecked by plastic pollution, and almost everything is flooded, with only certain island locations being above the water. You are something called a Tidewalker, a person who was at the bottom of the sea for a pretty long while, and has a connection to others of your kind.

When you get out of the water, you are rescued by a woman named Nahe and taken to her boat. There, she explains who she is, who you are, and some more basic information about the world. The most important thing she mentions is that you’re sick with an incurable illness called Plastemia, and gives you an “Ozen” canister, which helps slow it down and alleviate the symptoms.

And that’s basically the prologue to the story — after that, the decisions you make affect the world so much that you might have an entirely different experience from me. And that’s not all, as the choices made by the player you’re following could give you entirely different scenarios to deal with. For example, if your predecessor decided to anger the residents of some location, they might be hostile to you, or even completely inaccessible. The entire narrative you experience depends on a real person’s decisions while playing themselves!

Barring this mechanic, which the development studio, Digixart, labelled Online Story-Link, the gameplay is still pretty nice. Tides of Tomorrow plays a little like Life is Strange if it were first-person. There are some tense scenes where you have to run or sneak, and depending on your decisions, you might even have some pseudo-combat, but you can’t die from other people; either you go back to the latest checkpoint, or you get narrative consequences for failing the task.

The only real way to “lose”, so to speak, is if your condition worsens too much. In order to stay alive during the experience, you need to consume the previously mentioned Ozen, which isn’t that easy to get. Sometimes you could get some from shops, but that depends on your predecessor not having bought it already. You could also steal from other people, but that would have its own consequences for yourself and for your successors. Or you might even have been given Ozen canisters for free in one of the boxes that allow you to share items with other Tidewalkers, but if you take it, anyone following you won’t be able to survive.

If you do run out of Ozen, it’s not a game-over screen, and you don’t have to restart the whole title from scratch, but something… interesting happens, which I don’t want to spoil. Just know that if you don’t prioritise your health enough, some of the endings will be locked for you unless you start a new save. It’s not a super long experience for just one run, it took me about 11 hours, but if you want to see more content, there are so many different scenarios you could experience that it would take ages.

Tides of Tomorrow has a lot of scenes I would consider wallpaper material, and the visuals fit the theme perfectly. The art direction was incredible, and the way everything is stylised makes it clear the developers really cared about the message they were delivering with the title.

And not only that, but the music is incredible and adds so much to the experience. And even better, the silent scenes are scattered perfectly; you feel completely isolated during those. Not only that, but barring the player character, this game has full voice acting that was done really well. 

Overall, then, Tides of Tomorrow is an incredible title that was clearly designed with passion and care. It’s not very cheap, costing about £24.99 when not on sale, but given the story tells a powerful message, no matter which ending you end up with, coupled with the innovative gameplay mechanic that is Online Story-Link and the huge amount of lore and mysteries you can find, I think it’s worth it to almost anyone, and I definitely recommend it if you’re interested.