TIDES OF TOMORROW

Clean up pollution and other players' messes

- Dominic Tarason

An underappreciated part of Telltale-style narrative adventures is finding out what choices other players made, but in Tides of Tomorrow – next from Road 96 studio Digixart – they're flipping the script. You get to discover what your predecessors did before you arrived, and deal with the fallout of their decisions.

Set on the scenic water planet of Elynd, the human residents live in floating ramshackle cities surrounded by cartoonish levels of floating plastic junk. Things wouldn't be so bad were it not for Plastemia, a waterborne disease affecting much of the population. Forget microplastics; those afflicted seem to be slowly transforming into pearlescent mannequins.

Good news: you're a Tidewalker, a prophesied time-bending herald who might save the world. Bad news: Tidewalkers seem to spawn directly out of the ocean with a head full of plastic already and no memories of what to do. Good luck figuring it out while scraping together enough Ozen, the one drug that keeps you from becoming an articulated inaction figure. Similar to Road 96,