While Tides of Tomorrow looks like a drastic departure, it shares a lot in the same vein as DigixArts previous game, Road 96. This means a lot to me, given that I, like most people before me, like most fans of the company, would have probably told you the only thing I wanted them to do was a sequel. This isn’t the sequel I wanted, but in many ways, the spiritual success I could not have fathomed would become as meaningful to me. And yet here we are, and by the credit roll and an emotional catharsis later, it was.
The game opens up with your character, the Tidewalker, waking up in the ocean as you frantically swim out. I was inclined to think, especially because I have done this exact thing before, that I was drowning, but actually, you are being embraced into so much worse. Everything DigiXArt does embraces messaging; those familiar with their games should understand that, and here is an environmental theme that isn’t just about looking at all the plastic floating around, poisoning the lifeblood of Gaia. The ocean has been so polluted for so long that this water world-type future has led to a new disease that is also killing humanity. The water is full of this toxin, so congratulations, you have Plastemia.
Plastemia is represented by a health gauge in the corner of the screen that resembles a standard health bar. It acts similarly to the health gauge you had in Road 96, ticking down as you travel from place to place, rather than something that can actually be hurt. This forms the crux of the adventure you go on. As you receive tasks, you travel to different floating cities in the watery wasteland. Here, you are given a main mission to follow. That said, you would absolutely be doing yourself a disservice if you don’t search the area for items like Ozen that will heal your health gauge or scrap that can be used as currency.
These areas can be deceptively deep to explore as well, with nooks and crannies to squeeze your way into. This is beyond the secondary objectives you can find along the way, and maybe it’s to help some people out with disputes or problems before you go off to follow the main objective. There are six metrics by which your character can be leveled up as well. Pretty much everything from the branching dialog to the situations you force your way into affects at least one, opening up more dialog later on, sometimes even opening a locked door or two. This puts weight on every element of your seafaring adventure, though. There is a point where the person you choose to be might start locking you out of change, and watching the results of that can be devastating.
The plotline moves through several acts, mostly revolving around several factions coping in this world of Plastemia. This brings you into contact with several characters who all have their wants and needs, with the game largely playing out through narrative-driven moments where you get A LOT of wiggle room. Let me set the stage for you. In the marauder stronghold, I had to disguise myself as a marauder to get close to the lead Obin. Already, I had a few choices in how to get this group to trust me. Finally, I got into the room for an important meeting, one in which Ozen, the lifeblood of this world, was being traded. There is a fight between the two parties, and they go on the balcony to talk. There I am, in a room, with Ozen, I mean… To quote Anne Boleyn, what was I supposed to do?
I grab the drugs and run, dodging bullets as I make my way back to the start. Worth it. Here is the thing, though. While not a rogue-like, this game has a shared connected universe. Players, before they travel into any area, choose to follow another player who has been there. All of this is tied into the narrative. Your Tidewalker can never cross paths with another, despite them being out there, and the character being able to see visions of these other characters completing tasks that can help you do the same. In fact, these lead to some great payoffs later on, which is mind-blowing given that I could have just written this off as a video game mechanic and been done with it.
Choosing who you follow is everything, as you can see the kind of game they are playing. This isn’t even to say, Play with people like you. You might play like a horrible person, but chances are a player trying to be a hero left you a town much less adverse to the presence of Tidewalkers. This isn’t always the case, though. The situations you get drawn into often have no right choices, and you will be surprised by what you might agree with. I left an animal to be tested on despite desperately wanting to free it, because the dialogue just made it sound like more animals would be tortured for worse results if I did. I look back and regret leaving that digital fishy friend to that fate, but the other option just felt like it would make things worse for those who followed me. I mostly played pro-nature, too.
Even being unable to work together directly, you can help each other in different ways as well. One of these is these crates; you can leave the essentials for your followers so they have a better go of it. That is the best way of saying, “Sorry I pissed off everybody, Obin, and caused the market to be on full lockdown.” You can also repair bridges or ladders for the next person so they have different ways to explore the area. This trades the currency of scrape for pathways, placing the choice on you of just HOW you want to interact with this world. Even though nothing is massively large, it feels alive with possibility. More importantly, it feels worth protecting.
And every choice you make will carry weight, as the important people who guide you can be lost, and you can end up at odds. The trajectory can shift based on your choices, and not really in a way that you will not be left sitting in the mess you made, thinking about how badly you screwed everything up. Or, conversely, how you definitely did the right thing. Protect Elya or die trying! One could sit around talking about the voice acting, which is amateurish at best. Hi, Zach here. I grew up with Shenmue. I call this charmingly endearing. The characters grow on you by the end, with journeys that feel like a much more weighted version of everything that the team has done before.
Unfortunately, the biggest place the experience is lacking is in varying events, which I know the team can do insanely well. I can live with the fact that each area brings fleshed-out narrative beats. The fact that you can instance into some different narrative moments depending on who you follow helps make this even better, as well as adding replayability later on. Much of the game will run through this, which is the plus side of everything.
When the game branches off from this, it typically does one of two things: forced stealth sections or forced fleeing sections. Now, these aren’t hard moments; they just happen a lot. Stealth involves avoiding the red reticle of enemies that wander the area as you move between points A and B, with the bigger gimmick being that you can recall the tidewalker you are following to track the path they took. In a few places, this is used to actually track the previous player’s collapsing pathways so you can avoid falling to your doom. In almost all cases, the ghost moved too fast, so I ended up taking ten tries anyway. You respawn with the bad tile still gone, so you lose very little.
The chase sequences happen far more often. As I stated above, sometimes you just need to steal some Ozen and run for your life. This being said, you are often put in situations where somebody is going to want to kill you, so you end up fleeing an area chasing after a ghost, which tells you where to go, but isn’t really needed. They don’t track your time for these segments, so despite racing against it, there is no weight.
Even with less variety than their previous game, it isn’t like the variety isn’t really fun. Traveling between points is done on the player’s boat, which you have full control of, and you will find countless random events out at sea that are odd at worst, wild at best. You do indeed get to have boat battles with the gun on the front of your runner. A random sea event involves joining two nations that each have a single citizen on part of a boat, and their battles stuck with me. The best thing is, if you become a citizen of their nation, you can pass a law to help the next player who engages them. Even the team has compared this Death Stranding to the strand game genre, which I can see, but I just can’t do. There is something more human here, at least in my mind.
Other ways you connect are things like boat racing, which has you race against another person’s best time. Something you can bet against. This is where the mechanic might stumble a minor bit. I did love boat racing, but you can bet against beating the previous time set by a tidewalker, the one you followed to the area. I raced at one point against a player who took third in the race but somehow had a time of 1:40, which is a pretty good time. I was taking first place, but I could not break 1:42, making the time abstract. Early on, a scrape can be hard to come by. A good race bet can really help, and in a way you can’t truly predict, you might have just screwed yourself out of even 5 additional, which is not a great feeling.
Everywhere you go, though, is gorgeous to look at, a blend of tropical nodical mixed with mounds of trash that still manage to delight visually. Plastemia, as if to make a tragic point, is also a sight to behold, mixing vibrant colors across its victims’ flesh until it becomes unbearable, and you find them gasping for their last breaths. Helping fully flesh out this is also a tribalist soundtrack of chanting and drum beats that helps reflect how primal we become in the face of death, even as we act like we have class and culture.
Verdict
The story is about the end. This is obvious when we watch the population tick down at the beginning of each act. What Tides of Tomorrow does, though, to tremendous effect, is ask the most troubling question in that. The end of what? Is this the end of the world? The end of nature? What is left to experience when experience is made null and void? Is it even worth preserving? I found myself asking these questions with each choice I made, each step down the rabbit hole. That’s what this game wants.
Then come the harder questions. Will you be an ally or a hindrance? Do you even care that people are dying around you? And, most importantly, if you can stop it, will you even try to? Once again, DigiXArts has left me with an experience that will haunt me. Something that feels so disturbingly plausible despite the distance between them and us. This is the power of narrative storytelling in gaming.
At absolute worst, they just created an insanely good version of Waterworld, and that might be the biggest win.
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Reviewed For PlayStation 5, also available on Xbox Series, PC
A review key for this title was provided by DigixArt for the purposes of this review.
Developer: DigixArts
Publisher: THQ Nordic
Release Date: April 22, 2026
Pros:
+Great Choiced base narrative with weighted outcomes to decisions
+Following other players, and helping from afair gives a haunting sense of togetherness
+Fantastic cast of endering characters
+Geourgeous world and soundtrack
+Envokes powerful questions
Cons:
-Falls back on stealth and fleeing slightly too much
-Some co-op events can be hard to predict, making them hard to win before you even know what you did.
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Tides of Tomorrow
