The Tomorrow Children
Top Marx for originality
The (premium) early-access Founder’s Pack for the free-to-play title is here. Find out how it fares, today.
When it comes to inventive game plots you’ve got to credit The Tomorrow Children for having one of the most unique premises in a while – even if the title does sound like a spin-off of cult sci-fi show The Tomorrow People. Here, you play as a wooden girl who’s been created to restore humanity in The Void, a vast empty wasteland formed after the Earth’s near-destruction.
It’s up to you – along with other dolls controlled by other online players – to visit nearby islands that temporarily appear and gather materials to rebuild your town and populate it with the souls of the dead (trapped in Russian dolls). Then, when the town is populated, you move to another and do it all over again.
The result is a strange game that makes no bones about the fact that you’re a small cog in a larger machine, a sort of Marxism-‘em-up where you and everyone else put in small amounts of work that all contribute to a larger goal. For example, you and a couple of others could take the bus to a distant island and mine it for coal and other minerals, then have it all transported on another bus back to the town. There, other players can gather the resources and use them to improve the town while you stay on the island and keep working.
It’s an interesting mechanic and one that feels really satisfying when it all comes together, but when you’re sharing a game world with strangers with whom you can’t communicate (short of a couple of mute gestures, at least) this is a rare occurrence. Usually other players will just dump houses wherever they feel like and make the town look like a mess, one where the bus
THE GAME LOOKS BEAUTIFUL AND ITS SOVIETERA ART STYLE IS BRIMMING WITH CHARACTER.
often glitches right through scenery that’s been built in its path. Even in the paid early-access version, elements that encourage investment are present. To build a house you have to play a sliding puzzle mini-game, or you can fork over some virtual currency to skip the whole thing – a feature that won’t go down well with everybody who wants to dive in. It’s a real shame, because The Tomorrow Children is beautiful and its odd Soviet-era art style is brimming with character. It’s a game we’d love to play for longer, but Q-Games needs to continue building on it and providing more for players to do, because as it is just now, it’s a great concept that gets old a shade sooner than it should.
VERDICT
Visually stunning with interesting ideas, but the ‘fill a town then start again’ concept gets repetitive and the currency systems need extra balancing. Chris Scullion