The world of Tides of Tomorrow has already been drowned once, and now the next disaster is personal. In the apocalyptic adventure game, one player can shape what happens to the next, turning each run into a version of the same wrecked ocean world.
That idea landed in a hands-on session on the PlayStation 5, where the player character — a Tidewalker — was dropped into the ocean and rescued by Nahe. The player then refused Nahe’s last bottle of ozen and went looking for some on their own, a risky call in a setting where Tidewalkers suffer from plastic disease and are said to die without frequent doses. Nahe pointed the way with his brief, clipped advice to the Tidewalkers and their tides of time ability, the feature that lets players watch the actions of the Tidewalker they are following.
In this case, the player chose to follow TideLover, described as a survivalist with an affinity for mankind, and that choice paid off immediately. A bridge repaired by a previous player was still crossable, while another that had been destroyed remained broken, giving the run a world history shaped by someone else’s decisions. On the way through Scrap Harbor, a floating slum, TideLover’s earlier actions helped the player get their bearings, and the character eventually escaped with a stolen boat.
That structure makes Tides of Tomorrow a semi-single-player game in the clearest sense: it is still a solo adventure, but the map remembers what another person did before you arrived. The setting is a giant ocean after a Great Flood, with humanity living on boats and tiny islands occupied by the Reclaimers, the Marauders and the Mystics. The game pairs that ruined world with vibrant cartoon visuals and a groovy soundtrack, but its real hook is the way it asks players to live with decisions they did not make.
The friction is built into the premise. One player’s progress can become another player’s obstacle, and the game does not soften that possibility. As the unnamed player put it, choosing a real-life player to stalk means accepting that “my actions can royally fuck things up for the next player,” even as the same system can also make “my actions influence the outcome.” That is the gamble at the heart of the design: repair a bridge and it stays useful, destroy it and someone else has to deal with the wreckage.
For a game set in a world described as being killed slowly by plastic waste, that feels like the point. Tides of Tomorrow is not only about surviving the flood; it is about inheriting the consequences left behind by another Tidewalker and deciding what to do with them next.
