Rate top games𝐑𝐨𝐚𝐝 𝟐𝟎𝟗𝟔♻️
The developers are commendable for stepping away from their core franchise, but they certainly haven't strayed far.. Well, a little into the future, into a fantastical trashpocalypse – a perfectly logical theme, given 𝐃𝐢𝐠𝐢𝐱𝐚𝐫𝐭'𝐬 desire to address pressing issues in video games.
Tides of Tomorrow follows the same formula of a "dialogue road trip movie with minigames" that players loved for its freshness. TOT even takes this concept further by offering what was originally expected in this genre: a multiplayer mode. But not the classic kind you're used to, but a more suitable asynchronous multiplayer: when real players leave their own mark on your story, for example, we have a roulette of about 10 emotional gestures👋 that we can use to mark our locations - and they will be available for viewing by players following us via a special "vision" scanning button. You can gesture to a secret, point to where not It's worth going, or just fooling around. You can also use this button to view key dialogues completed by the player in order to ask the character a question based on them. Moreover, all the characters know that you are already a different "tidewalker", but until you view the vision, they still won't crack. Well, of course, in the dialogues there is always a note about choosing another player, or a streamer, or just a bot (if you have connection problems). You may have already seen similair system in 𝐉𝐨𝐮𝐫𝐧𝐞𝐲 or Death Stranding games - This is not exactly an innovation in the industry, but for now, such games can be counted on the fingers of one hand.
👥You can change your pioneer "Tidewalker" before each sailing to a new island, all players are in the same situation of a severe shortage of resources and a plot-related disease called "Plastemia", which requires taking 1-2 doses of the medicine "Ozen" every day, which can be obtained from characters / merchants, you can steal it from smugglers, or just find in the trash along with the local currency, if your "pioneer" was kind, then he can, to his own detriment, leave the spray can to you, while he doesn`t know who exactly will follow him, but the choosing player sees the traits of those who played before and is unlikely to follow the "lone" "troublemaker", and if you are also kind, then you can not take the spray and leave it to the next player - - it turns out to be an endless snake of kindness, where no one will get the resource, but everyone will boost the statistics of a 𝐩𝐡𝐢𝐥𝐚𝐧𝐭𝐡𝐫𝐨𝐩𝐢𝐬𝐭 and a "team player" , btw it opens an additional suit, and which will allow you to unlock a better ending; At the same time, I think that if you decide to act in your own selfish interests, it’s only possible “to see what happens/for fun”, this will not achieve anything except cutting off some of the endings; you decide to follow the evil "pioneer" and die from resource depletion, the game will forgive you the first time, but the second time it will cut off the best ending for you (but by the way, you will unlock a very interesting horror cutscene with the mole man); What I'm trying to convey is that I didn't see any benefit from playing a straight-up bad guy, i.e. you can only boost bad traits by accident, , which means the local good/evil system is a bit lost. At most, a couple of alternative paths will open up, and some secret ending with a change of one line in the credits. I'll say right away that all the game's endings lead to exactly the same place, where everything will be decided, simply depending on how well you balanced between being a good person and accumulating your own gain.
🐋 You're not obligated to save humanity. If you only help people, you risk losing your eco-activist branch. The thing is, local groups of marauders/robbers/cultists are oppressing the local whales - meridians - in one way or another, symbolizing nature (which humanity has polluted), whose eggs are the key to salvation from "plastemia". ⚖️And the game offers the most interesting dilemmas precisely between choosing what's good for "humans" and what's good for animals/nature. You won't be able to do everything good for everyone, but you can strike the right balance while maintaining your moral compass?
📉If the player before you unsuccessfully robbed a local mafia member or quarreled with the leader of the cultists, you'll have to complete the same story location using stealth - This is purely a minigame for variety, you won't be allowed to lose in stealth mode, the dummies are dumb, the corridors are small, simply use your Vision ability to see where the previous player was sitting and hide somewhere else; There's also a similar minigame of walking across the plates of a crumbling bridge, where you need to see the path of the player who's already passed; and there's micro-platforming to find secrets.
🚤💣And thanks to the new "boat" mechanics, we have single-player side missions - arcade boat sailing, a fairly smooth arcade and casual experience, but quite dynamic and enjoyable; simple circuit races; and sea battles, where you need to dodge red circles and press the fire auto aim button; losing is practically impossible here, so I recommend completing all the optional "sea events" just to farm resources and unlock additional characters with comical with comical stories... and, don't upgrade the boat's life! It costs a whole 100 coins, and the risk of breaking the boat is minimal (though there is a burning animation, I checked). It would have been cool if they'd made a hardcore challenge out of it, but the devs clearly wanted to keep it simple;
❓And why, you might ask, am I discussing so much about the mechanical aspect of a rare, purely "story-driven" cinematic game. Well, there’s nothing to hold onto here except the concept.. Yes, visually the authors have found their own unique style, where realism is mixed with a pastel effect with rather bright brushstrokes, and sometimes the views of local garbage dumps in the ocean are truly impressive, but the story is too large-scale to be immersed in it through such a small number of polygons. You'll soon see what I'm getting at. 🎵❌The music, as I understand it, was written in strange collaborations, some kind of choral singing - it doesn't particularly add to the atmosphere, just a pleasant melancholic background, but nowhere near the level of "Road 96". If you were looking for new tracks that eat into your head, then even "R96: Mile 0" had plenty of them;
And the game's plot revolves around caricature characters with a very specific appearance, the charisma of all of them combined is not enough even for Zoya from the "The Road", each of the characters, of course, is a leader of something, and each has sons and daughters with whom, of course, the protagonist is friends - this worked in Mile 0 with the "dictator's daughter", but when a larger story is advanced only due to this, it somehow always looks ridiculous, all the locations are small islands, where literally in tight corridors, "key" events for humanity occur around every corner, and the main plot twist is a cliche about a "prophecy" and super-ancient technologies of descendants (or aliens), the lore of which, of course, will not be fully explained to us, but seriously, even the plot of the survival game "Raft" has a more interesting presentation, several characters can die, and this is met with total indifference — which speaks volumes about the game's writing - 10 hours of dialogues of which, when you running back and forth between the same characters, trying to convince them to help you make a cure, begins to feel like torture. I've also read all the notes; they're short, everyday situations, nothing to add.
🤷To sum it up, 𝐓𝐢𝐝𝐞𝐬 𝐨𝐟 𝐓𝐨𝐦𝐨𝐫𝐫𝐨𝐰 tries to tell an overly ambitious story that demands a much larger budget, but it lacks the characters, music, and atmosphere to reach even 20% of what Road 96 achieved. The game is worth a try if you're ready for an indie experiment and willing to overlook the rough edges. But if you're craving a rare "story-rich" experience, you'll only get a run-of-the-mill title whose endings differ only in the credits, alas.
😊 𝗦𝘂𝗯 𝘁𝗼 𝗺𝘆 𝗦𝘁𝗲𝗮𝗺`𝘀 𝗖𝘂𝗿𝗮𝘁𝗼𝗿`𝘀 𝗽𝗮𝗴𝗲: https://store.steampowered.com/curator/41977550/
The developers are commendable for stepping away from their core franchise, but they certainly haven't strayed far.. Well, a little into the future, into a fantastical trashpocalypse – a perfectly logical theme, given 𝐃𝐢𝐠𝐢𝐱𝐚𝐫𝐭'𝐬 desire to address pressing issues in video games.
Tides of Tomorrow follows the same formula of a "dialogue road trip movie with minigames" that players loved for its freshness. TOT even takes this concept further by offering what was originally expected in this genre: a multiplayer mode. But not the classic kind you're used to, but a more suitable asynchronous multiplayer: when real players leave their own mark on your story, for example, we have a roulette of about 10 emotional gestures👋 that we can use to mark our locations - and they will be available for viewing by players following us via a special "vision" scanning button. You can gesture to a secret, point to where not It's worth going, or just fooling around. You can also use this button to view key dialogues completed by the player in order to ask the character a question based on them. Moreover, all the characters know that you are already a different "tidewalker", but until you view the vision, they still won't crack. Well, of course, in the dialogues there is always a note about choosing another player, or a streamer, or just a bot (if you have connection problems). You may have already seen similair system in 𝐉𝐨𝐮𝐫𝐧𝐞𝐲 or Death Stranding games - This is not exactly an innovation in the industry, but for now, such games can be counted on the fingers of one hand.
👥You can change your pioneer "Tidewalker" before each sailing to a new island, all players are in the same situation of a severe shortage of resources and a plot-related disease called "Plastemia", which requires taking 1-2 doses of the medicine "Ozen" every day, which can be obtained from characters / merchants, you can steal it from smugglers, or just find in the trash along with the local currency, if your "pioneer" was kind, then he can, to his own detriment, leave the spray can to you, while he doesn`t know who exactly will follow him, but the choosing player sees the traits of those who played before and is unlikely to follow the "lone" "troublemaker", and if you are also kind, then you can not take the spray and leave it to the next player - - it turns out to be an endless snake of kindness, where no one will get the resource, but everyone will boost the statistics of a 𝐩𝐡𝐢𝐥𝐚𝐧𝐭𝐡𝐫𝐨𝐩𝐢𝐬𝐭 and a "team player" , btw it opens an additional suit, and which will allow you to unlock a better ending; At the same time, I think that if you decide to act in your own selfish interests, it’s only possible “to see what happens/for fun”, this will not achieve anything except cutting off some of the endings; you decide to follow the evil "pioneer" and die from resource depletion, the game will forgive you the first time, but the second time it will cut off the best ending for you (but by the way, you will unlock a very interesting horror cutscene with the mole man); What I'm trying to convey is that I didn't see any benefit from playing a straight-up bad guy, i.e. you can only boost bad traits by accident, , which means the local good/evil system is a bit lost. At most, a couple of alternative paths will open up, and some secret ending with a change of one line in the credits. I'll say right away that all the game's endings lead to exactly the same place, where everything will be decided, simply depending on how well you balanced between being a good person and accumulating your own gain.
🐋 You're not obligated to save humanity. If you only help people, you risk losing your eco-activist branch. The thing is, local groups of marauders/robbers/cultists are oppressing the local whales - meridians - in one way or another, symbolizing nature (which humanity has polluted), whose eggs are the key to salvation from "plastemia". ⚖️And the game offers the most interesting dilemmas precisely between choosing what's good for "humans" and what's good for animals/nature. You won't be able to do everything good for everyone, but you can strike the right balance while maintaining your moral compass?
📉If the player before you unsuccessfully robbed a local mafia member or quarreled with the leader of the cultists, you'll have to complete the same story location using stealth - This is purely a minigame for variety, you won't be allowed to lose in stealth mode, the dummies are dumb, the corridors are small, simply use your Vision ability to see where the previous player was sitting and hide somewhere else; There's also a similar minigame of walking across the plates of a crumbling bridge, where you need to see the path of the player who's already passed; and there's micro-platforming to find secrets.
🚤💣And thanks to the new "boat" mechanics, we have single-player side missions - arcade boat sailing, a fairly smooth arcade and casual experience, but quite dynamic and enjoyable; simple circuit races; and sea battles, where you need to dodge red circles and press the fire auto aim button; losing is practically impossible here, so I recommend completing all the optional "sea events" just to farm resources and unlock additional characters with comical with comical stories... and, don't upgrade the boat's life! It costs a whole 100 coins, and the risk of breaking the boat is minimal (though there is a burning animation, I checked). It would have been cool if they'd made a hardcore challenge out of it, but the devs clearly wanted to keep it simple;
❓And why, you might ask, am I discussing so much about the mechanical aspect of a rare, purely "story-driven" cinematic game. Well, there’s nothing to hold onto here except the concept.. Yes, visually the authors have found their own unique style, where realism is mixed with a pastel effect with rather bright brushstrokes, and sometimes the views of local garbage dumps in the ocean are truly impressive, but the story is too large-scale to be immersed in it through such a small number of polygons. You'll soon see what I'm getting at. 🎵❌The music, as I understand it, was written in strange collaborations, some kind of choral singing - it doesn't particularly add to the atmosphere, just a pleasant melancholic background, but nowhere near the level of "Road 96". If you were looking for new tracks that eat into your head, then even "R96: Mile 0" had plenty of them;
And the game's plot revolves around caricature characters with a very specific appearance, the charisma of all of them combined is not enough even for Zoya from the "The Road", each of the characters, of course, is a leader of something, and each has sons and daughters with whom, of course, the protagonist is friends - this worked in Mile 0 with the "dictator's daughter", but when a larger story is advanced only due to this, it somehow always looks ridiculous, all the locations are small islands, where literally in tight corridors, "key" events for humanity occur around every corner, and the main plot twist is a cliche about a "prophecy" and super-ancient technologies of descendants (or aliens), the lore of which, of course, will not be fully explained to us, but seriously, even the plot of the survival game "Raft" has a more interesting presentation, several characters can die, and this is met with total indifference — which speaks volumes about the game's writing - 10 hours of dialogues of which, when you running back and forth between the same characters, trying to convince them to help you make a cure, begins to feel like torture. I've also read all the notes; they're short, everyday situations, nothing to add.
🤷To sum it up, 𝐓𝐢𝐝𝐞𝐬 𝐨𝐟 𝐓𝐨𝐦𝐨𝐫𝐫𝐨𝐰 tries to tell an overly ambitious story that demands a much larger budget, but it lacks the characters, music, and atmosphere to reach even 20% of what Road 96 achieved. The game is worth a try if you're ready for an indie experiment and willing to overlook the rough edges. But if you're craving a rare "story-rich" experience, you'll only get a run-of-the-mill title whose endings differ only in the credits, alas.
😊 𝗦𝘂𝗯 𝘁𝗼 𝗺𝘆 𝗦𝘁𝗲𝗮𝗺`𝘀 𝗖𝘂𝗿𝗮𝘁𝗼𝗿`𝘀 𝗽𝗮𝗴𝗲: https://store.steampowered.com/curator/41977550/