Tides of Tomorrow

I've been thinking about Tides of Tomorrow for days after finishing it, which says something, because on the surface it looks like a straightforward narrative adventure that could slide past you without friction. The hook is the Online Story-Link system, and it is genuinely unlike anything I've spent time with. Before each mission you select another player's recorded run as your Story-Link seed. Their past choices then reshape your version of Elynd: bridges they destroyed have to be rebuilt, NPCs who were treated warmly open doors for you that stay shut for other players, and resources they stowed in special chests await you like letters from a stranger. The three factions you brush up against - the medicine-controlling Marauders, the everyday-survivor Reclaimers, and the spiritualist Mystics - can feel entirely different depending on who you followed. Playing a level twice with different seeds and arriving at a hostile market versus a peaceful one is the kind of mechanical poetry that makes small studios worth watching. The world itself, Elynd, is a plasticpunk ocean planet where a disease called Plastemia is slowly turning every living thing into colorful plastic. The allegory isn't subtle, and it isn't trying to be. Your Tidewalker begins with no memory, sustained only by regular doses of an inhaler called Ozen - the same medicine the entire population depends on - and almost every moral choice in the game orbits that scarcity. Do you keep your Ozen or share it with a stranger who might die without it? Do you experiment on animals to accelerate a cure when the alternative is watching humanity collapse? The writing doesn't always match the ambition of those questions, but it asks them with enough sincerity that I found myself sitting with the decisions afterward. Where the game reveals its budget limits is in the gaps between those choices. Traversal is first-person and confined; you walk through levels looking for secrets or stealth past guards, and the actual feel of moving through the world is thin. Stealth sections are rudimentary, puzzles are rarely more than ambient decoration, and the resource-gathering loop can start to feel like a treadmill. There are brighter interruptions - boat races, nautical skirmishes, the odd chase sequence - and they do enough to prevent any single mode from exhausting you. The visual style compensates considerably: a comic-book-adjacent palette that makes pollution look luminous, with floating settlements that reward slow exploration. The original soundtrack, which also received a vinyl release, adds oceanic weight to quieter moments in ways that genuinely elevate them. The honest tension with the Story-Link system is that it can make your own agency feel secondary. Several reviewers noted that the player you followed often seems to carry more narrative gravity than your own decisions, especially in the early hours. The game's story can contradict itself when two players' branching paths collide awkwardly, and there is no way to fast-forward dialogue on a second playthrough - a real inconvenience if you are chasing the multiple endings. For players who want a tightly authored narrative with clear cause and effect, the asynchronous design sometimes feels like it gives with one hand and takes with the other. For players who love the idea of their choices becoming someone else's inheritance, it is something worth sitting with. Tides of Tomorrow is for players who read the credits and wonder about the people behind them - who care about a studio attempting something structurally new at modest scale and mostly getting it right. It runs roughly 15 hours and doesn't overstay that welcome. Road 96 had tighter storytelling, but this is the more formally adventurous game, and I mean that as genuine praise. Digixart is building something here that isn't finished yet, and being present at iteration one has its own quiet reward.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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