DigixArt, the studio behind Road 96 and its prequel, Mile 0, showed us their demo of Tides of Tomorrow back in 2025, a new game with an interesting asynchronous multiplayer mechanic.
Tides of Tomorrow begins with you, as the protagonist, choosing your “avatar” and the forerunner whose footsteps you will follow. You immediately see the most striking features of your “asynchronous” predecessor, whose actions will shape many of your solutions to problems and challenges.
You emerge following the ghost of a “Tidewalker”—called so by Nae, one of the game’s heroines who will help you navigate your own path through the world of the Game.
Right off the bat, your character begins to die from a disease that has spread across the world—plastemia. This disease causes the bodies of all living beings to become infected with plastic, which penetrates the body, organs, and brain. In the final stage, a person becomes like a distorted plastic mannequin, frozen forever by the abundance of plastic in the body.
Nae says that you need a cure, a medicine balloon—”Ozen,” and right then, we both determine the fate of whoever follows us and may suffer the consequences of another player’s choice—the forerunner whom we follow. Nae may have an Ozen balloon for us, or she may not, if the one we’re following has taken it, and we ourselves (if she has one) can leave one for the next player who follows in your footsteps.
This is what Asynchrony is all about: the decisions of whose footsteps you follow will determine the situation you find yourself in, the resources you’ll encounter, and the problems you’ll solve and leave for the next player.
For example, you might cross a bridge to the Ozen tank you need, but the bridge will break for the next player, forcing them to spend Junk (the game’s currency) to repair the bridge if they want to reach the same destination. If you repair broken ladders, they will be available to the next player, and likewise what you break will have to be repaired.
The consequences of your decisions will impact subsequent players in a wide range of ways, from turning previously friendly people in the area hostile to walking easily through enemies the previous Tidewalker had already pacified and befriended.
Or even at the first location, the Dump, you can meet a Homeless Woman sleeping in a trash bin. When you take her junk located nearby, she will fall out and demand that you give it back. You are free to return the junk to her, some of which she will still leave with you for your honesty, or you can even run into her corpse, because the Tidewalker who went before you had already robbed her, and did not return anything!
The game offers multiple paths that will lead you to your own ending, with a limited number of variations. Your path is determined by your decisions, as each can boost one of your character traits. There are five in the game:
- Pro-Mankind – being kind to human NPCs
- Pro-Nature – helping nature and sea creatures
- Survivalist – prioritizing yourself above all else
- Cooperative – supporting future Tidewalkers by leaving resources
- Troublemaker – leaving mischief and chaos in your wake
The decisions for boosting one of these traits are quite clear from their descriptions: leaving resources or an Ozen Cylinder in the Tidewalker box boosts Cooperative, while removing it gives you a point for Survivalist. Saving the local mereids—those free of Plastemia—and voila! Get a point for Pro-Nature.
Help people with whatever you can, whether it’s junk or Ozen Cylinder, and you’ll earn a point for Pro-Mankind. A Troublemaker and Survivalist can actually go around robbing, harassing, being rude to everyone and everything, and being a real pain in the ass.
When you reach levels 2-3 and 4 of these stats, new dialogue options will unlock. They’re really few and far between, but they’re incredibly helpful when needed. I should note right away, though, that the game can reveal the essence of who Tidewalkers are—but only if you level up one of the 5 stats to level 4.
That said, you will only learn about the required stat towards the end of the game, when you’ll DEFINITELY not have enough time to bring it up. Literally, at the very end of the game, before the final decision… Who does that? I almost quit when I realized the path I’d chosen wouldn’t give me any knowledge of my existence as the protagonist.
After all, I chose my path, I WANTED to know who the Tidewalkers were, and even though there were hints about it in the game’s entries, I needed to know FOR SURE, but… the developers decided I had no right to receive this information because of the path I’d chosen. You have to play through the game from scratch if you really want to uncover this secret. And no, I understand, it’s done for the sake of replayability, but you could have at least sweetened the deal a bit.
Your Tidewalker can see visions of other, previous Tidewalkers that have passed through locations before you, witnessing their decisions, their paths, their gestures—which they can use to either give you clues or, on the contrary, confuse and deceive you.
This mechanic has an interesting effect on your decisions; at more than one point, you’ll even be asked whether you believe the Tidewalker’s vision and whether they’ve changed a password, a statue, or something useful, purely to make fun of you. Who would you trust in these situations—the Pro-Mankind and the Pro-Nature player, or the Survivalist or Troublemaker? Oddly enough, both are capable of not lying to you, but rather of using special signs to indicate their choice in such moments.
Although I did encounter one such liar, after whom I had to deal with so many problems due to his selfishness that I decided to change the Tidewalker I was following after three locations… and even dying in the process, because he robbed everything and everyone, didn’t give me a single unit of Scrap to buy Medicine Canisters, was rude to everyone, and much more.
Following such a person is a real punishment, but it gives you a different path than a peaceful Tidewalker. During stealth activities, you’ll see “visions” of where other Tidewalkers were hiding, and you must avoid repeating them, see where they walked on extremely shaky walkways to avoid falling while following them, etc. The developers tried to diversify the usefulness of “visions,” which is nice.
The game is quite colorful, with locations designed in a post-apocalyptic style, featuring large floating platforms cobbled together from ocean scraps. There’s plenty to see: large wind turbines, broken and inoperative, a drilling rig that has become a base for the Scavengers—marginal outcasts with guns, led by the callous Obin—who decide who gets to own Ozen. Pleasure Island, created by the cunning and cruel Nyx, features races and fun in bars with all sorts of entertainment. The Dump is home to ordinary people tired of their lives, struggling to survive. The ocean is polluted, and you can see it everywhere: in the floating piles of trash, in the mud in the locations, in the piles of garbage both on land and underwater. The planet is flooded with both water and junk…
But the aesthetics are slightly compromised by the rainbow colors of everything. The locations don’t evoke the sense of doom that I think a game should have; the piles of trash and plastic don’t seem like a disaster. Even the people dying from plastemia seem like simple mannequins with strange paint jobs, posed by some puppeteer in various positions. While the poses are sometimes quite depressing, especially if you die for the first time, you’ll find yourself in an interesting, nerve-wracking situation.
The game’s visuals are generally brightly colored; the developers have always strived to create games with a distinct personality: not perfect, but recognizable and distinct. But I felt there weren’t enough accents to convey the inevitability of the catastrophe’s death for all living things. I think the visuals lack elements of neglect, wear, rust, and so on. They’re there, but they’re just too few and far between.
The locations are filled with detail, with people struggling to survive, fishing, cooking, and living their lives. Items from a time before the disaster caused by the “Deltas”—predecessors who possessed both AI and advanced technology—are being used in innovative and inventive ways. You’ll see many unusual solutions and interesting applications for seemingly ordinary objects. The kites flying over the ocean alone are truly remarkable, and the “Tai-dryer” drying things—I had a good laugh at that!
It’s a shame that some of these references can only be seen by following certain storylines, but this allows you to pay close attention to everything around you and enjoy the novelty when playing the game a second or even a third time.
A little on the history of this world. The world of Tides of Tomorrow is flooded by endless rains (as the fanatic Believers claim), a catastrophic amount of plastic poisons everything, and people are dying by the dozens every day, edging ever closer to extinction.
As you explore the world, you’ll discover many different documents, telling the story of both the world before the catastrophe and the present day. Fanatic sermons, information about the Delta experiments that attempted to save the world from catastrophe, and daily journals of people in the present day—all of this will allow you to uncover and understand the world a little bit better.
The gameplay is simple. As the protagonist, you can explore various locations, helping (or not) the people around you through conversations and actions. You can choose to save the Mereids, the local dolphins, try to save people from plastemia, or simply create chaos in the world for the sake of mischief.
Your decisions will lead to different consequences, and you’ll choose dialogue options that reflect your character and relationships. You’ll travel between locations on foot and by boat. On the boat, you’ll encounter various events and happenings that will add variety and flavor to your gameplay, and will also provide new information, along with currency and Ozen canisters—if you’re lucky.
Traveling between locations is key—you’ll need two health points, which are restored by Ozen. On the ship, you’ll also encounter combat events: pirates and enemies will try to rob you… or you can rob them. In naval events, you can recapture a poacher’s ship, robbing them along the way, and encounter floating stores, which you can ALSO rob (just be aware that the Tidewalker following you will suffer dire consequences). There will also be ship races, where your opponents will be both living people and, occasionally, Mereids. The Mereids will show you the way to the ocean junk as a thank you if you have a high Pro-Nature stat.
For example, upon arriving on Pleasure Island, you can participate in a race, the most infuriating Race in the game. To be a bit more specific, Nyx, the Island’s ruler, will make you an offer – if you win, you’ll become extremely famous and “Rich,” and voila, you find yourself in a race. In it, you see the “ghost” of another Tidewalker, see how they drove, where they turned, and their time… Do you know how many times I tried to reach in the first place? That’s right – about four hours of endlessly restarting this part of the story.
You compete against seven other NPCs who don’t give a damn about the laws of physics or logic. They are stupidly scripted, they fly past the accelerator – and still accelerate, pass through you, go along a perfect trajectory and overtake you. Knowing that I will NOT come in first, I launched the last saved point, which was 4 minutes before the start of the Race + 2 minutes of the Race. As a result – 6-damned-minutes, in which I was STUCK in an endless loop. Over and over again I heard the words “Welcome to my Garden” from Nyx. And these are the very words I would engrave on the forehead of whoever made this race. 4 hours filled with anger-denial-acceptance at the end, when I took 2nd place and finally decided to move on.
Besides, the first place driver “flew” ahead of me by about 10 seconds. Okay, oddly enough, the other races in the game are fair. The Mereid you can race against won’t be hurtling like a torpedo on turbojet thrust. The second race on the Island was also pretty calm, taking first place there was quite easy. And I can’t figure out whether you just can’t win the first race, or I’m just too clumsy and got lucky in the second…
Your decisions will be the key in Tides of Tomorrow, but due to the asynchronous multiplayer, some will be closed due to situations, while others will only be revealed at a certain point. And some decisions will raise interesting issues from the very beginning of the game: environmental, ethical, moral choice, sociopolitical, and even existential.
Issues of knowledge and religion, power and responsibility, relationships and love—issues of varying levels and importance—but all of them are extremely vividly reflected in our current lives and age. I like how the developers have posed these issues in the game, making us one of the participants, and a decisive element in most cases. This makes you engage with the game more deeply, approaching it not just as a banal game, but as a statement about global issues.
To sum it up, Tides of Tomorrow builds gameplay around a bold new feature, the asynchronous multiplayer, that will affect both your game and the game of the Tidewalkers to follow. Between the choices of your forerunner and your own decisions, no two playthroughs will be alike.
One controversial point is that it won’t be possible to answer all the questions of interest (in terms of who the Tidewalkers are, for example) without replaying the game, but this is also a plus; the game can and should be played more than once in order to learn all the points of view and available options.
