Tides of Tomorrow – ghostly gamers offer a novel navigation of the climate crisis | Games

Azure skies; crystalline waters; a flotilla emblazoned with “welcome to Pleasureland”. It sounds like a dream holiday but this is actually dystopia: continents lie submerged after the Great Flood; a disease caused by toxic plastic ravages every living organism.

There’s no mistaking Tides of Tomorrow for anything other than anxious “cli-fi”, but its tone is exuberant, brash and irreverent rather than moody or dread-laden. The setting is the fictional planet of Elynd which, says lead game designer Adrien Poncet, lets him and his colleagues take liberties with the science and technology they are depicting. We see one character inhaling “ozen” from a canister – it’s an oxygen-like substance keeping people alive. Elsewhere, players bear witness to striking and unsettling images, including a vast mass of bobbing plastic akin to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.

Fans of DigixArt’s previous project, the border-crossing adventure Road 96, will feel at home with the surfeit of gameplay challenge in Tides of Tomorrow. You make your way across the ocean of Elynd, encountering pirates, religious cults and deep-sea trawlers of junk, and there is first-person exploration along with a peppering of minigames and scripted action sequences (including, as you might expect, boat-driving sequences, plus, less predictably, the odd stretch of parkour). But Poncet stresses the game is fundamentally about a thrilling, branching narrative. Kill a criminal kingpin or attempt to escape? The choice is yours: live – or die – by its consequences.

There is a new, notably ambitious wrinkle to this long-standing choose-your-own-adventure formula. Playing as a so-called Tide Walker (the name is liable to change), you share what Poncet calls a “strange link” with other Tide Walkers. They appear to you as phantasmic visions – out of time but not out of place. Here’s the rub: these visions are not pre-programmed encounters but other players connected to you via the internet, and they have already played through the same events. Think of this as an asynchronous multiplayer system like ghosts in Elden Ring, only here they tangibly affect your game, perhaps leaving a key item such as a knife to plunge into said, unsuspecting kingpin.

You only ever follow in the footsteps of one player at a time, getting to know them through their decision-making impulses. Who might they be? “Either a random person on the internet, a friend, or perhaps your favourite streamer,” says Poncet.

Quickly enough, the chain reaction of decisions made by both you and your ephemeral, tethered partner begin to stack up. Testing a game of such dizzying narrative configurations is proving very challenging. “[Tides of Tomorrow] is the first game pushing this idea of asynchronous multiplayer narrative to this extent,” says Poncet. “We don’t have any blueprint, any preconceived way of approaching this. It’s uncharted territory.”

For all the whiz-bang novelty of this component, the lead designer maintains that it speaks to the game’s deeper themes – indeed, that the mechanic doubles as a carefully considered metaphor. After all, what is navigating the all-enveloping climate crisis, and perhaps even mitigating its worst effects, but a gargantuan collaborative effort involving people spread across vast continents?

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“Tides of Tomorrow is questioning the player about our own world,” says Poncet. “But it’s especially about keeping hope alive in a world where everything seems lost, and about helping each other in a common effort to make things better.”