Tides of Tomorrow Review
Tides of Tomorrow builds its post-apocalyptic adventure around a clever social storytelling system that connects every player's journey to the next.
Tides of Tomorrow. Credit: DigixArt / THQ Nordic
DigixArt’s Tides of Tomorrow features a novel asynchronous multiplayer story system where another player’s choices permanently shape your own experience. Unfortunately, the moment-to-moment play never quite rises to the level of that ambition.
You play a Tidewalker on a flooded world, moving by boat between island communities while chasing answers about a plastic-borne disease and the mess humanity made of everything. The hook is the Story-Link system, which lets another player’s decisions bleed into your game through ghostly echoes of their past actions. The result is altered faction outcomes, missing supplies, and paths that have already been wrecked or opened up. In broad terms, it feels like DigixArt taking the idea behind Souls phantoms and messages and evolving it into something much larger. The residue left by strangers can change quest states and character relationships instead of merely pointing you somewhere. That idea is strong. The game’s handling of environmental collapse and human behavior under pressure is strong too. Players naturally drift toward different moral identities—cooperative, survivalist, pro-nature, pro-mankind, troublemaker—and those choices ripple into how other people experience the world. The game’s world feels lived in and desperate, but still hopeful.
Tides of Tomorrow is mostly a narrative adventure, though it regularly dips into action. Sneaking past guards is bare-bones stuff. Boat combat comes down to dodging, locking on, and firing, and it never develops into anything particularly interesting. The races feel bolted on. These sections dilute the stronger parts of the experience instead of supporting them. Dialogue scenes carry much of the game because local disputes, medicine shortages, and faction tensions give your decisions real weight.
Tides of Tomorrow. Credit: DigixArt / THQ Nordic
The Story-Link system is novel, though the game rarely trusts players to connect the dots themselves. I got sick of characters telling me what the last guy did, how awesome he was, or how terrible he was. A subtle echo in the environment or a changed quest outcome is interesting. Repeatedly being told about what’s happened drains away the sense of discovery. Tides of Tomorrow has smart narrative ideas, then keeps overexplaining what’s going on while surrounding them with action bits that don’t add much.
The stylized 3D art is vibrant and distinct within its weight class as an AA game. Polluted water, ramshackle settlements, and color-splashed communities give every stop a strong identity. The soundtrack is all over the place in a way I half admired and half tolerated. Lou Corroyer’s score gives the world real texture, but guest tracks from artists like Doodseskader and KOKOKO! sometimes feel out of place. Things will be great, then suddenly a metal track kicks in and makes me roll my eyes.
Tides of Tomorrow is worth playing for its setting, its social-choice experiment, and the stronger dialogue-driven moments. I just wish DigixArt trusted those strengths enough to cut back the flimsy stealth and weak combat. That version of the game would have been much stronger.
Tides of Tomorrow
Tides of Tomorrow turns another player's choices into a fascinating social storytelling experiment, even if its action mechanics rarely feel as compelling as the world around them.
