Tides of Tomorrow Review Roundup

Tides of Tomorrow is launching today on PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X/S, and the first round of reviews is in. Initial review scores for Tides of Tomorrow vary quite a bit, but at the time of writing, the game has earned a “Strong” rating on OpenCritic based on 29 critic reviews.

First announced in June 2024, Tides of Tomorrow is an asynchronous first-person multiplayer adventure game that sees players assume the role of a Tidewalker, a survivor of a cataclysmic flood who’s suffering from a condition that will soon turn their flesh into plastic. While players search this watery world for a cure, they’ll come across visions of how other real-world players interacted with the environment and its inhabitants. These interactions can then impact the player’s experience, with mission conditions potentially being altered and NPC behavior changing based on the previous player’s actions. Tides of Tomorrow has been developed by DigixArt, the studio behind games like Lost in Harmony, 11-11: Memories Retold, and Road 96.

Tides of Tomorrow Hands-On Preview

Game Rant went hands on with Tides of Tomorrow to see how its asynchronous multiplayer lets players shape stories for those who come after.

What Tides of Tomorrow Reviews Are Saying

Tides of Tomorrow Tidewalker arriving at Pleasureland

There are currently 29 critic reviews for Tides of Tomorrow on OpenCritic. These review scores range from 6/10 all the way up to 9/10, leading to a Top Critic Average of 77, and a critic recommendation score of 61%. While further reviews could be added to the pool in the coming days, it’s unlikely to change Tides of Tomorrow‘s OpenCritic score too much.

Stevivor (Steve Wright) — Score: 9/10

Managing your own personal health can be quite stressful, let alone the state of the world around you. It’s here that Tides of Tomorrow excels, providing some choice in how its narrative unfolds, but creating a far tighter, far more polished experience as compared to Road 96. It’s a fantastic evolution.

DualShockers (Shane Limbaugh) — Score: 8/10

With some intriguing world-building and phenomenal choices, Tides of Tomorrow is a game that warrants some real investment. It isn’t perfect by any metric, but it is good enough to draw you in and reward your time. Seeing everything through, even when it’s tough, gives you a sensation of completion that very few games can achieve. With the innovative Social-Link system, there’s a real opportunity to create a new sort of way for players to interact, but it hasn’t been perfected just yet.

TechRaptor (Ashleigh Klein) — Score: 8/10

The time spent with Tides of Tomorrow was a truly refreshing experience overall, as the story had me hooked once the pacing started escalating. The Tides of Time mechanic is quite an innovative way to create a unique shared multiplayer experience with others while retaining player autonomy in allowing us freedom of choice in creating our story…Where the issue lies is that it can be a cause of concern for players with visual impairments, and outside of its colour vision settings, it doesn’t possess expansive accessibility features to tone it down a notch.

TheGamer (Harry Alston) — Score: 7/10

I enjoyed my 15 or so hours with Tides Of Tomorrow, but I won’t be replaying it. It’s a game that you could definitely replay if you vibe with it, because there are plenty of different choices that you – and whoever goes before you – can make, but I feel like I’ve got my fill of the world, and was generally satisfied with the outcome of my narrative. Even if I heard most of it before I got there.

GameSpew (Kim Snaith) — Score: 7/10

Do I wish that Tides of Tomorrow was a straightforward single-player game with none of its online story-link shenanigans? Probably, yes. But while I have some annoyances, there’s no denying that underneath its unique, sometimes misguided, choices, there’s a fantastic narrative here that has kept me gripped.

Loot Level Chill (Kieran Singh) — Score: 6/10

Connecting your playthrough in Tides of Tomorrow directly to that of the player before you is an undeniably clever way of hinting that we all need to think about preserving the planet for future generations. That doesn’t change the fact that Tides of Tomorrow unfortunately left me feeling frustrated at times due to heavy-handed storytelling, simplistic mechanics and a loss of immersion caused by its own standout mechanic.

Based on these initial reviews, it seems that Tides of Tomorrow‘s strongest quality is its overarching narrative. While Loot Level Chill claimed that the game featured “heavy-handed storytelling,” the vast majority of other reviews praised Tides of Tomorrow‘s story and its natural sense of pacing. Many reviews also praised Tides of Tomorrow‘s world-building, with it putting forward unique concepts like the “Plastemia” disease and ingraining that into the moment-to-moment gameplay via environmental and character design.

An element that’s proving to be a tad more divisive, however, is Tides of Tomorrow‘s Story-Link mechanic. This is the mechanic that allows players to see another real-world player’s prior actions, and it’s arguably one of the core elements that sets Tides of Tomorrow apart from the crowd. While some critics have heralded this Story-Link mechanic as innovative, others have said that it actively gets in the way of the game’s narrative, spoiling the possible choices in an area long before the player will encounter them for themselves.

Rearrange the covers into the correct US release order.

Easy (5)Medium (7)Hard (10)

Tides of Tomorrow‘s accessibility features have also been criticized by at least one outlet, with TechRaptor stating that the visuals of the in-game player ‘ghosts’ that appear via the Story-Link mechanic may be a cause for concern for those with visual impairments. Ultimately, it sounds as though Tides of Tomorrow features a strong narrative and an intriguing central premise that doesn’t always hit its mark.