Tides Of Tomorrow Review

Tides of Tomorrow

In the world of gaming, creating something completely unique is rare. It’s not that there aren’t new IPs or anything like that, but often times a game fits a specific mold and will use commonly used game mechanics. So when DigixArt announced Tides of Tomorrow and showed off a more advanced, unique version of asynchronous multiplayer, I was instantly intrigued to see how they pulled it off. I’m happy to say for the most part, they have.

For those unfamiliar with asynchronous multiplayer, it is most known in games like Dark Souls and Death Stranding. While you play the game alone, you see “ghosts” of other players that will maybe leave you a clue to find an item or show you the way to go. It’s a nice little addition to the games, but by no means the core function of the game.

With Tides of Tomorrow, DigixArt has turned that up to 100 and created a game that is centered around asynchronous multiplayer – that they call their Story-link system, and how someone else plays the game, giving you clues but also shaping the story for your playthrough. At the beginning of the game you will get to choose a player you want to follow. These players are just random players and you don’t know much about them beyond an idea of how they played. If they have a high troublemaker stat, then they likely played a rude, disruptive game. If they show as Pro-Mankind, they were probably more forgiving.

Once you make your choice you will head into the game and are instantly thrown into peril as your character is drowning on the planet of Elynd. You will be saved by a woman named Nahe who tells you that you are a Tidewalker. Tidewalkers are from the ancient civilization, aka humans from Earth who first settled.

Nahe tells you that humanity is dying from a disease known as plastemia. Plastemia essentially puts plastic in a human’s systems and slowly hardens until you become a plastic, dead body. The powers that be have created Ozen, a temporary way to reverse the effects of plastemia. Ozen essentially works as a health potion for the game. Nahe and many others are looking for a more permanent cure, and that is what they need the Tidewalkers for.

There are many factions on the planet however, and each of them have their own ideas of how to shape the world. These factions are all pretty standard for your typical post apocalyptic worlds. There’s the crazed religious group, the thugs who want to control things and the oppressed poor.

To Follow Your Fellow Tidewalker Or Not?

From here on out, your game is affected based on who you have chose to follow, and what they did when they went through the level. You are able to press a button to see memories which will show you some of their actions. These memories have a wide range of uses. Sometimes they will show you a direction they went that led to some in game currency, which are scraps. Sometimes it will show them pressing a hidden button to open a secret door.

Will this ladder be broken for you of functional? That all depends on the previous Tidewalker

But the most important things these memories will do, is show you some of the story related choices they made, and help guide you in your own decision making. It won’t outright show you the dialogue choices they made, but it will show you how the conversation went and ended. It’s then up to you to either try and piece together the conversation to get the same result, or if you want to do the opposite try and figure that out.

For the first couple of missions my immediate reaction was, this is a fine gameplay mechanic, but I’m not sure it was really needed. It almost felt too gimmicky. However once you get further into the game it truly shines and evolves the game. As your story progresses, so too does the Tidewalker’s story you are following and things will change. You might get to a section of the game where they had done drastically different things in the lead up to this point, so you will see much different interactions, especially if you decide to follow someone else.

Not only will what you see be different, but how people interact with you will be different. If the previous Tidewalker helped this faction when they were here, they will meet you with happiness and want to help. If they stole or did something else nefarious, things will be much more difficult for you.

How the loop of the game works is you will be in your boat and travel to islands. Each island is a level. You will go to it, complete it and then hop back in your boat and rinse and repeat. You will often be given multiple choices of where you want to go next. Do you follow the Tidewalker you have been following, or go a different direction and follow another. Doing so will drastically intertwine their stories and in my opinion is the best way to go about things.

It’s really difficult for me to talk about this mechanic without spoiling anything within, but just know that what they’ve done with this mechanic is really impressive and helps elevate the story. I thought it was going to be a pretty generic story, but they did a great job with it and the voice acting is equally as good. I really connected to the characters and this world. And because of this, it will have a lot of replay value which is great for a single player experience.

The one maybe negative about this though is that the order you went in didn’t seem to matter much. Often times your options would be “go here and help this character” or “go there and help that character”. I kept waiting for those choices to change the game. If I for example helped Nahe then maybe another character would be mad I didn’t help them first, or maybe even more dramatically something happens to them. Those moments never came.

Lots of Adventure, Little Action

Outside of the asynchronous multiplayer, Tides of Tomorrow mostly plays as an adventure game. Outside of a couple of encounters on your boat, there is no combat within the game. Quite frankly there isn’t much of anything in terms of dealing with enemies.

There are restricted areas in each of the missions where you have to stealth around and not get caught. If you do, you are instantly shot and killed and have to restart from a checkpoint. None of it is that difficult and with some basic planning and timing you can get through things quite easily. Outside of those moments the vast majority of the game’s roughly 10 hour runtime is just going around the areas, listening to memories and interacting with the world and characters within it.

I don’t consider that a bad thing, especially since the games story carries it so well. If you are going to have minimal gameplay mechanics then you have to nail the narrative and adventure aspects, which DigixArt has. The game is also gorgeous to look at. It’s art style and colour palette remind me a lot of Borderlands and I’m all for it.

And if you are wondering why Ozen acts as a health potion when you can’t get hurt in a battle or anything, inbetween each mission when you head to your boat you lose 2 health bars. Lose all your health bars and you faint and go to the games version of an underworld. Faint a second time and your story is drastically altered. This means before getting into your boat at the end of an area you needed at least 3 health bars.

Depending on your playstyle this can either be very difficult or quite easy. On my first playthrough I was trying to save as many people as I could. This meant giving away a lot of Ozen and having very little for myself. I’d have to search high and low just to get a spare bottle to avoid fainting.

My second playthrough I was much more about keeping myself alive. On this playthrough I was swimming in Ozen. Of course because of this the inhabitants of the world weren’t quite as helpful so it made the game more stressful in a different way.

Odds and Ends

I have to take a moment to mention the games music. It’s bumping! This isn’t music I would put on in my car or anything, but the transition cutscenes and when driving the boat fit the game really well and is just a joy to listen to.

Also this is more for those of you who are into achievement hunting, but we gotta talk about the collectibles achievement. The final collectible in the game is found near the end of the game. In order to access it the door for the room needs to be unlocked with 2 hand scanners. Yours and whomever you were following.

The idea is a nice one, but if the person you are following didn’t interact with the door before you, then you literally cannot collect it. To make matters worse there is no chapter select or anything. This means you’d have to replay the game up to this point again and hope that whoever you followed this time interacted with the door.

The achievement hunter in me wants to knock the score down 3 pegs just for this alone, but I’m a professional so I won’t judge with my score, just with my Gamerscore. That said if that’s my only real complaint about the asynchronous multiplayer, you know they’ve done a good job.

Final Thoughts

Developer DigixArt went bold and unique with Tides of Tomorrow and it has paid off. With characters you can get heavily invested in, a surprisingly deep story and a gorgeous world, there is a lot to like here.

How they’ve integrated the asynchronous multiplayer is a mechanic that many developers should look at for future titles and opens many doors for storytelling. If you are looking for a ton of action, Tides Of Tomorrow likely won’t be for you. But for narrative driven single player fans like myself, it’s a must play.