Tides of Tomorrow Review

While you don’t play Tides of Tomorrow with other people, it’s a story that depends on them. The actions of other players who have played the game can change things within your playthrough, affecting things for better or for worse. You may, for example, find yourself having to sneak through a lockdown because the player you’re following behind was so disruptive while they passed through. It’s a unique mechanic that leads to some interesting effects, but it might get in the way of the story and experience as much as it helps.

Tides of Tomorrow is set in a Waterworld-style apocalypse, where most of the world is flooded and some people have live on mostly constructed platforms floating in the ocean or attached to a bit of land. These platforms are surrounded by rubbish, most of it plastic left over from the old world. It’s not just these big plastics that are an issue, though, as the real world problem of microplastics has infested everything and the people are suffering from the fictional disease of Plastemia. This causes them to literally turn into plastic, leaving behind a horrific, plastic mannequin of themselves. The only reprieve is Ozen, a scarce and controlled substance that relieves the symptoms. It’s pretty grim.

It doesn’t look like it, though. In fact the game has a bright and vibrant art style that looks gorgeous, especially the environments. The people look decent, too, though the facial animation leaves a lot to be desired unfortunately. The game’s tone is oddly bright as well, in spite of a lot of doom and the high stakes in the story. The actual gameplay is focused more on collaboration and cooperation, even if many of the characters you’ll meet aren’t. It sounds good too, with the only issues being a few weaker voice actors – not terrible, but not quite pulling off some of the more intense lines.

So how does it tell its story? Well, you’re a Tidewalker. This is someone who, for some mysterious reason, woke up in the ocean, surfaced, and now has visions. These visions are of other Tidewalkers – another player who has already completed this level. The visions can tell you where they went, what they did, sometimes even what they said, which can be useful and inform your own decision making. A vision might reveal something specific, like how the Tidewalker before you failed to do something, allowing you to avoid what they did in hopes of succeeding. Or maybe you need to talk your way into somewhere, you can simply watch a vision of how the player before you did it and choose the same dialogue options.

Before you play a level, you can choose to follow a specific player from a list of randoms or use a code for a specific person you know, and you can switch players every time you travel to a new location. When choosing someone to follow, you can see their dominant traits, like Survivalist for example, which means they did things to ensure their own survival, or Pro-Mankind, which means they sought to help out other humans. Every action you make fits into one of these traits, so this gives a decent summary of how they played, but with only five traits, your actions are often defined too broadly and counterintuitively. I once didn’t intervene when someone was going to stop a riot, because I thought that riots are bad in general, but the action was deemed part of the “Troublemaker” trait. Not causing a riot is basically the opposite of making trouble. A player you’re following might also have deviated from their most dominant trait within a particular level, leaving you with a bit of unpredictability when making your choice.

Using this odd setup, you’ll piece your way through a mostly story-focused game, the specifics of which are constantly morphing depending on who you are following. How much it morphs can be difficult to pin down, though. I once freely walked through an area whilst following the visions of the player before me who was crouched and sneaking around, clearly a significant difference in the level. In another level I saw a player conversing with a character I didn’t see at all in that level, found out the player was betrayed by that character, and then at the very end with that character just showed up and the game said she “betrayed” me too, despite me having nothing to do with her.

That’s far from the only inconsistency that can sneak in. I once arrived at a level to be told that all the Mereids – an aquatic animal used for food – had escaped and that the Marauders who run the place had gone out to recapture them… but then someone wanted me to free the Mereids and I had to sneak past guards. It’s a pretty clear contradiction, if you ask me.

Even without these bugs, the problem with following other players is that you don’t know how well a player you’re following did, and this can make your experience more difficult. I once restarted a persuasion sequence six times to see if I could overcome the previous player’s actions, and found that it has made it completely impossible for me. The asynchronous storytelling is an interesting mechanic and it does foster a sense cooperation and collaborative play, but it takes away some of your agency, so you often can’t actually do anything significant for yourself unless you’re following someone who has already done it. I can’t even play through the game again to get a better ending, because I don’t know where I went wrong. I don’t even know if it was me that did something wrong, maybe it was the player I was following? Maybe I didn’t collect enough eggs?

That’s right, I spent maybe half of this game gathering eggs for a particular plot beat, gathering them in groups of one to five eggs at a time. I ended up with almost six hundred of them combined with contributions from factions in-game and still didn’t have enough, forcing me into an ending I didn’t want. Not only did I not know how many I needed in advance, but I took every single opportunity I saw to gather these eggs and the game said I did well.

There are stealth sections and even a few chases interspersed, but they’re rather basic and barely an inconvenience. The chases in particular feel a bit silly, with enemies shooting automatic rifles at you whilst you sprint away, jumping over gaps and obstacles, all without getting hit even once. You can’t fight back, just run away – there’s no explanation for why you can’t pick up a gun, you just can’t.

Between locations, you get around on a boat and can engage in two further activities: racing and boat battles. Again, these are pretty basic, with the boat battles just being you dodging red circles in the water where enemy rockets will land, though here you do get to shoot back with your boat’s cannons. I literally never once lost a boat battle and was barely hit more than twice in any of them. The racing? Well, racing in games that aren’t racing games is rarely welcome and here it’s extra shallow, pun not intended.

Despite its structural issues, I would say that I enjoyed the story, though it is a touch predictable in places (when it’s not being annoying unpredictable). I would say that, no doubt thanks to the stealth and boat combat sections, the game felt long and starts to wear out it welcome before the end of its roughly ten hour runtime.