Tides Of Tomorrow review – like Waterworld without Kevin Costner

The makers of Road 96 return with a new indie game whose unusual storytelling and decision-making is inspired by the multiplayer of Dark Souls and other From games.

Although multiplayer in video games usually just means competitive action, or perhaps a spot of co-op puzzle-solving, there are some games that take an alternative approach. FromSoftware’s games, for example, do feature standard co-op, at certain points, but for much of the time your only interaction with other players is by seeing their ghostly forms battling, and dying, in their specific instance of the game.

This approach to asynchronous multiplayer seems to have been the inspiration for developer Digixart, makers of Road 96 and its prequel, in this new first person adventure set in a post-apocalyptic flooded Earth. Its endless sea is riddled with plastic waste and you start the game as one corpse amongst many, floating amongst the flotsam, before suddenly springing back to life.

Swimming, disorientated, to the surface you discover your condition marks you out as a Tidewalker, a revenant whose life unexpectedly restarts despite time spent as a submerged cadaver. Unfortunately, it’s not all good news, because like many people in this watery new reality, you’re suffering from Plastemia, an illness caused by all the micro-plastics in its ecosystem. It can’t be cured, but can be slowed using Ozen, a medicine that’s in chronically short supply.

The world’s population is now less than 300,000 and shrinking, with a sizeable chunk of survivors falling victim to Plastemia. When you pop back to life you don’t know any of that. But you do suffer from strange visions, signposted by wavering tears in space-time, that let you view the actions of fellow Tidewalkers that passed the same way you did. You can choose to follow one of them, letting their actions inform your passage through what turns out to be a very linear narrative.

As well as seeing moments from their gameplay, you’ll also be dealing with fallout from their decisions. If they helped characters and generally made themselves useful, the authority figures you encounter are likely to be friendlier and more helpful. If they went round stealing things and wrecking the place, you’ll find the people you meet considerably frostier.

Provided you stop frequently, to check for spots where you can experience these visions, when you make choices in the game’s conversations you can see which ones the other characters chose when offered the same prompt. These normally boil down to an agreeable, a neutral, and a sassy response, but you’ll also find decisions about whether or not to commit a crime, gift scarce bottles of Ozen or take it for yourself, and a range of incidental choices related to the areas you visit.

Sadly, these decisions often feel inconsequential, the plot branching fairly obviously before rejoining its original trajectory, a point made clear by the fact that you can diverge from the options taken by the player you’re following, including which areas to travel to in your boat, but still find yourself following in their footsteps later. And whatever approaches you try and take, you’ll find yourself needing to transgress society’s laws from time to time.

That leads to stealth sections so primitive it’s surprising to see them in a modern game. Frankly, they would have felt jarring in the PS1 era, at least post-Metal Gear Solid. Clunky mechanics, poorly rendered environments, and instant, ramification-free resets if you make a mistake. It’s depressing stuff and certainly not the only problem with Tides Of Tomorrow, a game whose noble intentions are continually undermined by what must have been an extremely low budget.

Like the decisions you make that seem to lead nowhere, you can also choose to leave currency and bottles of Ozen for players who follow your path, but other than increasing your ‘co-operative’ rating, this seems to achieve little. You can also trigger emotes which will be visible to your asynchronous followers, but other than a few key points where they have to guess the decisions you made, these seem to confer no particular value either.

The same applies to shifts in relationships. If your preceding Tidewalker was a committed troublemaker, you can usually turn guards or characters you meet from sworn enemies to lifelong friends in a couple of conversational choices. It robs the system of any sense of importance, rendering it a trivial concern rather than a cause for weighty consideration of your actions and their potential implications.

There’s a scattering of boat-based events, including lacklustre races and moments where you need to fire missiles at opponents, but thanks to the rudimentary mechanics and poor animation these sequences demand patience rather than skill. Equally, the levels you get to explore are very basic in design, with gobs of currency to discover, poorly realised characters, and choices that have scant impact on the story.

You can see what Tides Of Tomorrow is going for. Its frequent moral choices, unusual multiplayer elements, and attempts at stealth and action, along with the eco-messaging, could have made for a complex and exhilarating set of interactions, each of which affected both narrative and the paths of players following you. Sadly, budgetary constraints have led to something well-intentioned but crude, its gameplay and plot almost childlike in execution. It’s a particular disappointment given Digixart’s previous titles but this is a game that needed a lot more time and money to realise its ambitions.

Formats: PlayStation 5 (reviewed), Xbox Series X/S, and PC
Price: £24.99
Publisher: THQ Nordic
Developer: Digixart
Release Date: 22nd April 2026
Age Rating: 16

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