Tides of Tomorrow review: "Your choices in this microplastics apocalypse are shaped by other players, feeling like a sharp, well-crafted theme park ride"

Tides of Tomorrow has lush blue oceans dotted with bright colors, and a bopping soundtrack that puts you in a good mood. It's beautiful, and not what you'd expect from an apocalyptic tale. But, look a little closer. All those bright colors floating in the water and embedded in people's skin is actually plastic. Just like bright colors in nature, this distinctly unnatural, man-made phenomenon is deadly, and with a population count that begins at about 260,000 and ticks down chapter by chapter, this microplastics plague may truly be the end of days.

How bad it gets isn't just up to you, but Tides of Tomorrow's player-base as a whole. Dubbed a Tidewalker, you're one of many amnesiac protagonists comatose beneath the planet's flooded waves, who are now awakening as walking, talking signs of a prophesized final days. Tides of Tomorrow is still your story with its own plot beats and ending, but the choices of those around you affect the situations you'll come up against – from whether a bridge has collapsed from player overuse and needs repair, to if a whole market island is in military lockdown. Coming from developer Digixart, who also made the fantastically dystopian choice-driven Road 96, Tides of Tomorrow feels like an evolution of the studio's own take on what branching narratives should be like.

Synthetic apocalyptic

Tides of Tomorrow's dwindling survivors won't be surviving for long. Under the grip of plastemia, their skin hardens and becomes colorful until they end up as eternal plastic statues, with trash piling up around them. Only the drug Ozen staves off the encroaching disease, and more plastic pokes out of just about every food source – even the fish you can see in the market. But, Ozen is drying up, controlled by a select few. Some even give themselves up to their fate, partying up at nightclubs for the doomed where they dance until they're dead on their feet and the staff toss them back out to sea round the back. It's a fascinating take on the apocalypse, and one almost uncomfortably relevant.

Being part of a chain of players who have gone through Tides of Tomorrow ahead of you (the number of which are canon is a bit nebulous, but is meant to feel tight rather than truly endless) can make the game feel a bit like a theme park ride. But, I mean that as a compliment. Tides of Tomorrow is filled with striking characters from each of its factions – the scavenging Reclaimers; the bandit-like Marauders; and the old-tech scholar Mystics (it's a little bit Horizon: Zero Dawn) – who are willing to immediately welcome you into the adventure, with personalities strong and clear enough for you to immediately 'get'. They might feel like theme park cast members, but good ones.

So too does the sense that each island you visit is being constantly reset and shuffled between a couple of states add to that theme-park-like style of illusion, where every guest is an important hero in a long queue. Again, that might sound like a problem – but Tides of Tomorrow feels like it leans into the approach with such aplomb that I love it, and it goes a long way to making the interaction of player choices feel natural, even if it requires reaching a hand towards the player to buy into the experience.

As a result, meeting these characters and exploring each island, crafted to place its unique problems you'll be facing front and center, feels immersive even while it remains gamey. The buy-in is easy to achieve, and it makes exploring each new area, and seeing which character will show up to team up and guide you through the experience great fun to give yourself over to.

There's tension beyond simply seeing how the oncoming total apocalypse is affecting communities, as you also need Ozen to buoy your health between each island, and as the situation gets worse you really can end up sweating over having enough resources for yourself.

Each chapter is split into several bite-sized episodes that have you visiting new islands, from artificial structures like market towns or floating pleasure districts, to abandoned old-world research bases and religious sites on huge pieces of coral. Always following in the footsteps of at least one player (you can select from several from random players to your own friends, and switch before each outing), you might have plenty of choices of your own to make but your tale is always at least partially reactive to the adventure that happened just before your own.

In a sense, you always get to see both sides of each route, too – so I never really feel like I'm missing out on much. At any point, a squeeze of the trigger allows me to see, almost Dark Souls-style, a ghost replay of what the player did before me, from major to minor interactions, and even trails of emotes. At times, Tides of Tomorrow plays with this directly, asking you to question whether a repeated password was then later changed by the player, or if their pointing emote is a trick. Usually, it isn't. So far, the early player base is co-operative, which Tides of Tomorrow definitely encourages. Even when supplies of Ozen and Scrap get scarce, Tidewalker caches where surplus supplies can be shared usually contain something, and later events reward co-operation.

For example, in my Tides of Tomorrow hands-on preview, my trip to Marketland took place after a player lifted a lockdown, and I ended up combing an active market for information before planning an Ozen heist – deciding to distribute it among the city's neediest. During this full playthrough, I ended up reacting to a player who had done the same as I had the first time, the benevolent decision actually encouraging a brutal Marauder lockdown as citizens are shaken down in the streets on a hunt for the stolen goods. Instead, I have to sneak through the market to find where the Ozen had been stored, working backwards to sneak through where the theft had taken place to instead try to free a captive ally. The routes aren't completely different, but recontextualize story decisions and spaces in a neat way, feeling a bit like A and B routes.

Along for the ride

On occasion, the approach can feel a bit like you're being left behind by your own story. Another instance has me teaming up with Eyla, a Reclaimer deeply ill with plastemia, to spend some time with a friendly mereid – an almost cat-like shark-thing that's naturally immune to plastics, making it an over-farmed food source. It ends with the mereid captured by Marauders, with Eyla rushing off to stage a rescue. Only, I arrive to find out she teamed up with the preceding Tidewalker, and I instead end up pressured by Marauder mob boss Obin into investigating the fishy theft after the fact.

But, for every time I feel a little behind the curve, there's many more times each island episode truly grips me, and I even feel like I'm getting the better, more exciting and involved adventure than the person just before me as events have escalated (even while part of my brain is sure their own context makes the same true for them). Choices and consequences have been smartly handled to both feel like they have a lot of impact for each player, while also leaving room for adventures to circle back on themselves. Where one player might steal a bathing Mystic's clothes as a disguise to sneak in, I instead strike a deal with that Mystic to recover his clothes in exchange for safe passage inside. So it goes.

Like any good theme park experience, I begin Tides of Tomorrow loving the craft but a bit sceptical about the buy-in. But, by the end of this surprisingly lengthy adventure, I've allowed myself to become truly immersed. As an encroaching storm endangers one settlement I eagerly accept being handed tools and asked to mend as many struts as I can find, not needing to fix up the struts from the player beforehand, while simultaneously being challenged to try to repair more than that player for an extra reward. Only a theme park ride could mix the lavish production of danger with a high school challenge. I've made the choice to get immersed, to get involved, to meet Tides of Tomorrow on its level.

Every island offers something a bit new. Predominantly, you're walking around making decisions – Tides of Tomorrow can feel like a watery take on Fallout without the RPG, focusing instead on story choices. But, it's not afraid to deploy moments of real thrilling action, having you rush and jump away from guards opening fire, or using the cannon on your boat to board ships as you sail between islands – with a thumping soundtrack to match, the whole score is excellent. Importantly, all in first-person, the controls, while simple, always feel tight and responsive.

My own ping-ponging route through each island now feels like an adventure of my own, and while I don't think I want to replay it and overwrite my personal tale, if I see someone eyeing up this ride outside I have to recommend they dive in. Tides of Tomorrow's unique approach to mixing a community of player decisions together makes this choice-based narrative adventure feel fresh, and its deadly, colorful apocalypse is one I can't look away from. If you love story-focused games and weighing up difficult decisions you need to play Tides of Tomorrow, like, yesterday.

Check out our best story games list for more narrative recommendations!