We’re finally getting our big budget Kevin Costner’s Waterworld game in Tides Of Tomorrow
We’re going to need more than 40 quarters
Enough moons ago to qualify as quite a lot of moons but not so much for me to categorise them as ‘many’, Alice Bee wrote about an Itch game called Kevin Costner’s Waterworld - a fully playable extrapolation of a Simpsons’ joke from three decades ago. Simpsons jokes from three decades making up most of my sense of humour, I of course thought it was brilliant. And yet, I couldn’t shake a singular, burning question: What if this, but not joke? Enter Tides Of Tomorrow. Ok, so I actually don't know if it has anything in common with Waterworld aside from having lots of water everywhere. Still, I'll never pass up an opportunity for a crispy Simpsons reference.
Tides Of Tomorrow is from Road 96 developers Digixart. It’s a first person joint, and a lot of the action looks to take place in a floating crime-berg called Pleasureland. At the start of the trailer, the protagonist huffs a canister of gas, which might be responsible for the rainbow-hued spirits they see flickering around the place as they progress.
You soon get put in a big sack and dragged in front of a large crime man. This is to answer for your crimes, which apparently interfered with his crimes. Behind him, you see more of the spectral figures, this time with some button prompts - which suggests to me that some sort of time fudgery might be involved. One of the time ghosts pops a knife in front you, which then becomes real, letting you grab it. This is all still a cutscene, mind. As nice as Tides Of Tomorrow looks, it’s the Day Of The Devs announcement that struck me as having picked up the most bad habits from AAA. Very flashy, but very little information on how the thing actually plays. I'm not even sure what genre it is, honestly. Is 'water' a genre? Water is important. Maybe it should be a genre?
We do at least know they’ll be some sort of choice system. Here, it’s the winning conundrum “kill dude with knife” or “do not do that”. I don’t care all that much about this, but a few seconds later, we’re shown the protagonist getting to speed about a bright blue ocean on a little boat, which I do care about. Fast boats are neat, providing they offer more freedom than just that to stab or not stab dudes. If I sound vaguely cynical, it's because I sort of am, but only because I think this game probably deserved a better presentation. Either way, it should be available to wishlist on Steam right this moment.
We saw this one at Day Of The Devs. You can keep up with all our picks using this here tag.
The flurry of summer games events are now underway! Hit up our Summer Game Fest 2024 hub and our Day Of The Devs roundup for all the news worth caring about from the shows so far.