Tides of Tomorrow Review: A Game Where Everyone's Choices Matter

Tides of Tomorrow is a little unlike any game I've played before. It introduces some new ideas and interesting gameplay mechanics to create a connection across players' stories. While the idea is strong, it seems the execution could be a bit more honed in for later iterations.

Even so, I actually thoroughly enjoyed my time in this game, and some of the more interesting choices will stay with me. A lot of things in Tides of Tomorrow just don't land until it's almost too late, and for certain things, it can be a really amazing payoff, while others suffer as something that feels a little less important.

But even with any of the problems Tides of Tomorrow has, what's there is still pretty great, and the team over at Digixart has crafted something similar to their past game, Road 96; some things just need a bit more juice to make them worth the effort. It's a pretty short game, sitting at around 12 hours to play, but there are definitely some excellent reasons to replay this one.

What is Tides of Tomorrow?

Tides of Tomorrow is an RPG where you'll move through a story that changes as you make various choices. The kicker? Other players' choices will also affect you. This is done through something the game calls Social-Link, which basically lets you see what options players choose in dialogue as well as the path through the level they took.

To break it down simply, you play as a Tidewalker, a person dredged up from the past with no memory due to a disease called plastemia. In this world covered in 90% water and 100% plastic trash, pretty much every human alive has this plastic-based disease. Your mission is to try to save everyone somehow by making choices and moving through various levels.

Every choice you make corresponds to a category for the most part. Each of these six categories increases in value as you make choices that contribute points to them based on the choice made. For instance, if you choose to save sea creatures fairly often, your highest category will be Nature, or if you choose to help the next Tidewalker in line, you'll increase Cooperative.

You're not alone as you follow another Tidewalkers' journey of your choosing, whether it be a friend, streamer, or someone completely random. With minimal interaction, it's up to each player to decide what they leave behind for those who come after. Every choice made by players will have an impact on the world and eventually culminate in some serious changes on some levels.

You'll also need to manage your resources wisely, since every time you visit a story location, your disease will progress, eventually killing you. Collecting bottles of Ozen by spending scrap you collect or finding the bottles out in the world can put this off little by little. There are places to donate these things to fellow Tidewalkers, but you always run the risk of not getting enough for yourself.

Almost a Visual Novel

I like Tides of Tomorrow, but actively playing the game felt a little slow. It does have some very engaging moments, but almost all of them come from the choices and results you experience. You're basically walking around the levels searching for secrets or attempting to complete whatever objective you have at that moment.

It's more like a treadmill for you to gather resources on as you make your way to your next dialogue. There's just not a lot going on in the game aside from these choices you make throughout the story, and while those merit some interest, the rest of the game is painstakingly slow.

There are some high moments where you're doing some ship-to-ship combat in your little boat or having a boat race. These were fun to break up the monotony of the game, but they didn't really play too much of a part in the game as a whole. Besides those moments, basically everything in the game boils down to moving around a level, looking for secrets, or hiding from enemies.

I really wanted the game to have something beyond dialogue to invest in, but aside from the ways you can interact with other Tidewalkers, it's almost exclusively dialogue. It can be a good thing sometimes, as I felt myself interested in seeing things through, but it did wear on me as I played, hoping for the gameplay to evolve just a bit.

Your Choices Matter, but Not More than Theirs

The Social-Link is such a cool concept, but it feels a little underbaked in the game. Interacting with players without having to interact with them directly is great, but the biggest problem here is that their choices seem to rank astronomically higher than yours. This feels much more prevalent in the early game than it does as you approach the end.

Whenever you start a new mission, you can choose someone to follow, but you can also see what their two highest categories are. This means you have no idea what the potential outcome was of their time in the mission, which can drastically change how things play out for you. In theory, that sounds really cool, but in practice, it starts to wear you down, especially when they make choices that might make things harder for you.

The story doesn't revolve around these choices, as you'll end up in a similar situation most of the time, so you don't just get a totally different story beat, although something different might still go down. It did make the game a little more interesting as I attempted to navigate the choices of my predecessor in the hopes of figuring out how to fix things.

The main problem with this is that, because other people's choices matter so much, your choices feel almost irrelevant. That isn't the case as you get closer and closer to the end of the game, but it takes far too much time for that to become apparent. That being said, if you manage to stick it out, the game has a pretty solid domino ending that I really enjoyed.

The Difficulty of Making a Choice

The core gameplay element here is the choices you make. For a lot of RPG games, this boils down to three sorts of archetypes: The Good Guy, The Bad Guy, and Chaos Incarnate. In Tides of Tomorrow, you can certainly play into those stereotypes, but as the game progresses, things get significantly more complex and complicated.

Just making one choice sets in motion a domino of events that can culminate in some pretty insane endings for things. One of the main points of the game is sort of Nature vs Humanity, and in one mission, you'll need to decide whether you're okay with painfully experimenting on animals to find a solution to the plastemia problem.

Without doing it, there's a chance humanity, including you, could die, but you could also potentially destroy the ecosystem to the point that things are irreparable. That's pretty much how every choice ends up. Both can be argued for and against, and some have unforeseen consequences.

This is what makes the game so much fun to play, and something players can play more than once to experience events that could greatly change how they perceive certain characters. The big choices of the game carried a lot of weight and never had a "right" answer, which made them significantly more interesting.

Life is Plastic, Fantastic

I'll be the first person to admit that, in the beginning, I thought I had this game pinned. In my mind, it was going to be this sort of thinly veiled criticism of how microplastics are ruining our lives and killing us all, and it was that to a certain extent, but there was something deeper in that setup.

It isn't just about pointing out the destruction of our environment; it's also about our connection to each other and how the choices we make don't just affect us. There are a lot of intriguing story beats going on in the game, and a lot of crossing paths, which can lead to some confusion about the results of certain choices.

Even with that, by the end of the game, I found myself eager to see the fruits of my labor. In my case, a lot of those fruits were rotten, and I may have been frustrated, but they made sense. Regardless of those choices, I thought the visual elements of the game were really gripping.

Some dead bodies that have been "plastified" can be seen around levels, and depending on your choices, they may get worse and worse. In such a colorful and bright world, it was great to have some darker moments when looking around the surroundings. Even with that, there's a lot of beauty in this dystopian world, from watching sunsets against piles of trash to looking out over a coral vista.

So Nice You'll Play it Twice

All of the above is a fascinating way to make a game replayable – offering choices that can drastically change things much later in the game makes for an engaging second playthrough, especially when you feel like you have a solid grip on the story beats being presented.

I do think the game is a little long, which feels odd to say, for what it's going for. If it were shorter and significantly more focused on the story without the ancillary parts, playing through a bunch would be easy. This felt strange given the success of the team's previous Roguelike title Road 96, but I do understand wanting to do something a little different this go round.

If you find yourself liking the ideas the game offers up, a second playthrough would just make the game that much better. Getting all of those different experiences, which can be doubly different depending on the Tidewalker you follow, brings so much to light that a second playthrough is almost mandatory.

With some intriguing world-building and phenomenal choices, Tides of Tomorrow is a game that warrants some real investment. It isn't perfect by any metric, but it is good enough to draw you in and reward your time. Seeing everything through, even when it's tough, gives you a sensation of completion that very few games can achieve. With the innovative Social-Link system, there's a real opportunity to create a new sort of way for players to interact, but it hasn't been perfected just yet. Tides of Tomorrow isn't the next big game, but it is a game that will stay with people long after they finish it.