The Waves of Tomorrow it’s unlike any game I’ve ever played before. Introduce new ideas and interesting gameplay mechanics to create connections in player stories. Although the concept is strong, it seems that the execution could be improved a bit more for later iterations.
Still, I really enjoyed my time in the game, and some of the more interesting choices will stay with me. A lot of things in Tides of Tomorrow don’t last until it’s too close, and for some things, it can be a wonderful benefit, while others suffer as something that feels less important.
But even with any problems that Tides of Tomorrow has, what is still very good, and the team over Digixart has done something similar to their previous game, Road 96; some things need more juice to make them worth the effort. It’s a very short game, sitting around 12 hours to play, but there are good reasons to replay this one.
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What is Tides of Tomorrow?
Tides of Tomorrow is an RPG where you will go through an evolving story as you make various choices. Kick him? Other players’ choices will also affect you. This is done through something in the game called Social-Link, which basically allows you to see what options players choose in the dialog and the path through the level they took.
To break it down simply, you play as a Tidewalker, a human created from the past who has lost his memory due to a disease called plastemia. In this world covered with 90% water and 100% plastic waste, almost every living person has this plastic based disease. Your goal is to try to save everyone somehow by making decisions and going through various levels.
Every choice you make has multiple categories. Each of these six categories increases in value as you make choices that award points to them based on the choices made. For example, if you choose to save sea creatures more often, your highest class will be Nature, or if you choose to help the next Tidewalker in line, you will increase cooperation.
You’re not alone as you follow other Tidewalkers of your choosing, be it a friend, a streamer, or someone completely random. With little interaction, it’s up to each player to decide what to leave behind. Every choice the players make will have an impact on the world and eventually culminate in a big change in some of the levels.
You’ll also need to manage your resources wisely, because every time you visit a story area, your disease will progress, eventually killing you. Collecting bottles of Ozen by using the scraps you collect or by finding bottles in the world can gradually eliminate this. There are places to donate these items to other Tidewalkers, but you always run the risk of not getting enough.
Almost a Visual Novel
I love Tides of Tomorrow, but actively playing the game feels slow. It has some very engaging moments, but almost all of them come from the choices and results you get. You go through the levels looking for secrets or trying to complete whatever mission you have at the time.
It’s like a treadmill so you can gather resources as you go to your next interview. There isn’t much going on in the game other than these decisions you make throughout the story, and while those are worth some interest, the rest of the game is very slow.
There are some high moments where you do some ship to ship battle in your small boat or have a boat race. This was nice to break up the monotony of the game, but they didn’t play a big part in the game as a whole. Outside of those moments, basically everything in the game boils down to walking distances, searching for secrets, or hiding from enemies.
I really wanted the game to have something more than a conversation that I could invest in, but without ways to interact with other Tidewalkers, it’s pretty much just conversation. It can be a good thing sometimes, as I felt interested in seeing things go well, but it inspired me as I played, hoping that the game would evolve a little.
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Your Choices Matter, But Not More Than Them
Social-Link is a great concept, but it feels a little under-played in the game. Interacting with players without directly interacting with them is great, but the biggest problem here is that their choices seem to be astronomically higher than yours. This feels more common in the early game than near the end.
Whenever you start a new mission, you can choose who to follow, but you can also see what their top two ranks are. This means you don’t know what the outcome was during their time on the mission, which can drastically change how things go. In theory, that sounds really cool, but in practice, it starts to wear you down, especially when they make decisions that can make things difficult for you.
There isn’t much going on in the game other than these decisions you make throughout the story, and while those are worth some interest, the rest of the game is very slow.
The story does not match these options, as you will end up in the same situation most of the time, so you don’t just get a completely different story beat, although something different may go down. It made the game a little more interesting as I tried to navigate my predecessor’s decisions in hopes of finding a way to fix things.
The big problem with this is that, because other people’s choices are so important, your choices are almost irrelevant. Not as much as you get closer to the end of the game, but it takes a lot of time for that to show. That being said, if you can stick with it, the game has a nice solid ending that I really enjoyed.
The Difficulty of Choosing
The key gameplay aspect here is the choices you make. In most RPGs, this comes in three types of archetypes: The Good Guy, The Bad Guy, and The Chaos Within. In Tides of Tomorrow, you can play into those stereotypes, but as the game goes on, things get harder and harder.
Making just one choice sets off a domino of events that can culminate in some crazy endings. One of the main points of the game is Nature vs Humanity type, and in one mission, you will need to decide if you are right by trying hard on animals to find a solution to the plastemia problem.
Without doing so, there is a chance that humanity, including you, may die, but you may also destroy the ecosystem beyond repair. That’s exactly how all decisions end. Both are debatable and controversial, and some have unintended consequences.
This is what makes the game so much fun to play, and something players can play more than once to experience events that can drastically change how they see certain characters. The game’s big decisions carried a lot of weight and never had a “right” answer, which made them all the more interesting.
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Life is Plastic, Fantastic
I’ll be the first to admit that, at first, I thought this game was nailed. In my mind, it was going to be this kind of thinly veiled critique of how microplastics are ruining our lives and killing us all, and it was to some extent, but there was something deeper in that setup.
It is not just about pointing out the destruction of our environment; and it’s about our connection to each other and that the choices we make don’t just affect us. There are a lot of interesting story bits going on in the game, as well as crossovers, which can lead to some confusion about the consequences of certain choices.
The game’s big decisions carried a lot of weight and never had a “right” answer, which made them all the more interesting.
Even then, at the end of the game, I found myself eager to see the fruits of my labor. In my case, most of those fruits were rotten, and I may have been frustrated, but they made sense. Regardless of those decisions, I thought the visual aspects of the game really caught on.
Some “made of plastic” corpses can be seen in the levels, and depending on your choice, they can be very ugly. In such a colorful world, it was nice to have dark moments when looking around. Still, there’s a lot of beauty in this dystopian world, from watching the sunset against a pile of rubble to looking out over a coral vista.
So Good You Will Play It Twice
All of the above is an interesting way to make the game playable again – offering choices that can change things much later in the game makes the second playthrough interesting, especially if you feel like you’ve got a firm grip on the story beats being presented.
I think the game is a bit long, which sounds weird to say, what it’s all about. If it was shorter and focused more on the story with no parallel parts, it would be easier to play in bulk. This felt strange given the success of the team’s previous title such as Roguelike Road 96, but I understand that we wanted to do something a little different this round.
If you find yourself liking the ideas the game offers, a second playthrough can make the game even better. Getting all those different experiences, which can be doubly different depending on the Tidewalker you’re after, brings so much light that a second playthrough is almost mandatory.
With interesting world-building and amazing choices, Tides of Tomorrow is a game that warrants real investment. It’s not perfect by any metric, but it’s good enough to draw you in and reward you for your time. Seeing everything, even if it’s difficult, gives you a sense of completion that very few games can achieve. With the new Social-Link system, there is a real opportunity to create a new kind of way for players to interact, but it has not been perfected yet. Tides of Tomorrow is not the next big game, but it is a game that will stay with people long after they finish it.
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