Meeting DigixArt at Gamescom 2025
At Gamescom 2025 I sat down with Adrien Poncet, Creative Director, and Kevin Bard, Producer at DigixArt, to talk about their upcoming narrative adventure Tides of Tomorrow. The studio behind Road 96 is back with another experiment in storytelling — this time blending narrative choice with asynchronous multiplayer in a flooded, plastic-scarred world.
What follows isn’t a raw Q&A, but a story-driven look at our conversation — how DigixArt is building their next game “the indie way,” and why Tides of Tomorrow might be one of the boldest narrative experiments on the horizon.
Table of Contents
Note: no spoilers ahead — we only discuss systems, themes, and design, not the story beats.
Innovating Narrative, the Indie Way
This was my very last interview of Gamescom, and after three days of sprinting across halls, I was thankful Adrien Poncet and Kevin Bard didn’t mind keeping it casual. We dropped onto a couch at the THQ Nordic booth, grabbed a controller, and let the conversation flow — no PR handler (no offense, guys!) breathing down our necks, just a cozy chat.
DigixArt isn’t exactly the studio that plays it safe. If you’ve heard of Road 96, you know the drill — a narrative road trip stitched together with procedural chaos, hitchhiking through stories that bent and reshaped themselves on every run. For their new project, Tides of Tomorrow, the Montpellier crew asked the same kind of “what if?” but flipped the board entirely: what if multiplayer itself became the storytelling device?
…what if multiplayer itself became the storytelling device?
Adrien explained it: “With each of our games, we tried to innovate with the formula of narrative games.” It was the kind of line you believe because it didn’t sound rehearsed — just straight from the guy still buzzing on too many hours of explaining the same wild idea.
That punky philosophy fits the way they build games, too. DigixArt is just 30 developers, but they don’t carry the giant outsourcing machine you’d expect from a studio punching this far above its weight. Voice actors come into their studio, face capture is done with an iPhone, and localization is about the only thing they hand off. Some AAA teams brag about million-dollar mocap rigs; DigixArt brags about iPhones duct-taped to tripods.
It’s scrappy, it’s colorful, and it’s exactly the kind of approach that can create a world where following another player’s bad decision about a medicine bottle might ruin your life. Call it reckless, call it freedom — but it’s the reason I’d rather follow these 30 devs into uncharted waters than watch another safe sequel drown in budget spreadsheets.
Following in the Wake of Others
Most narrative games put you in the driver’s seat. Tides of Tomorrow starts by asking you to pick whose wreck of a car you’d like to sit in. The hook is simple but brilliant: your story is shaped by the actions of someone who played before you. Could be a friend on Steam, a random stranger, or even your favorite streamer if they hand out their seed code. Anyone’s walkthrough can be shared with a unique seed, and there are no limits on how many times it’s used.
Offline players aren’t left behind either. You still have to follow someone, but for solo (or offline) play you can pick a premade seed created by the devs. No matter what, the design insists you’re not alone — you’re always walking in someone else’s footprints, even if those footprints were hand-carved by DigixArt.
It’s not just a neat gimmick. The whole design loops back to the central theme: legacy. What do we leave for those who come after us? A clean path? A burning wreck? Or maybe just a missing bottle of medicine. (Yeah, we’ll get to that one later.)
There’s something almost punk about the idea — your progress isn’t pristine, it’s messy, marked by strangers, full of questionable choices you never agreed to. And that mess isn’t just cosmetic: it literally opens or closes doors in front of you.
Visions of the Past, Choices of the Future
Here’s where the whole system reveals its teeth. Tides of Tomorrow takes place in Elynd, a drowned world scarred by pollution and scarcity, where every player leaves traces behind. Through the Tides of Time vision mode (similar to Witcher Senses or Batman’s Detective Mode), you peek at what the person before you did — their choices and their screw-ups. NPCs don’t treat these echoes as abstract lore either. They react like it’s lived history. Adrien showed how subtitles replaced “the last survivor” with the actual name of the player he was following. That small trick suddenly makes the chain of stories feel like one continuous timeline.
And then comes the medicine bottle. Nai, the first ally you meet, hands you a single dose of ozone, the only treatment that slows the plastic disease — the main bane of this world. In this future, microplastic pollution has fused into human bodies, turning skin rigid, hard, and brittle. There are no zombies here, no mushroom-men, just people slowly becoming trash until they collapse. Anyway, Nai makes it clear: this is her last bottle. If you take it, the next rescued survivor will go without. Imagine being that next player, arriving sick and desperate, only to hear: “Sorry, gave my last bottle to <player name>.”
It’s not scripted inevitability. It’s the weight of another person’s decision slipping into your playthrough. Bridges may already be broken. Chests may already be looted. Characters may already distrust you because of someone else’s reputation. The world isn’t neutral when you step into it — it’s inherited.
And that’s where I can already picture the community kicking in. People will start min-maxing their seeds like mad scientists. Some will babysit you, planting every possible resource and outcome so you coast through like it’s story mode. Others will rip the place apart, leaving nothing but burning wrecks and piles of bodies — effectively creating nightmare difficulty for anyone unlucky enough to follow in their wake. But that’s a challenge — and we, gamers, love them.
A Drowned World of Plastic
“The intro is very mysterious — you wake up in the water, no idea who you are or what happened to the world,” Adrien told me while showing the demo. And the water never stops being a threat. The seas aren’t just a backdrop in Tides of Tomorrow — they’re the stage, the danger, and the glue that holds the whole experience together. Travel between islands happens by boat, with storms battering your hull mid-journey, sudden pirate encounters flipping crossings into skirmishes, and stretches of open ocean where survival depends on whether the last player left you anything useful.
It isn’t a safe ocean cruise — it’s more like a punk take on Waterworld (1995), except neon colors are splashed everywhere instead of aluminum and rust in Kevin Costner’s dystopia.
Speaking of that, I had another Gamescom meeting on a title with a similar DNA — a robot survival-crafting game on a fully flooded Earth. You can check out my interview and hands-on here: The Last Caretaker. Out of the 22 games I covered at the show, three of them took water as their whole surface. Interesting coincidence.
But back to Tides of Tomorrow. Each new island (and there are 15 at release) is both opportunity and risk, a place to gather what you need or burn through the little you have left. That rhythm — storm, shore, survival, repeat — makes the setting feel alive, not just a painted map.
What makes it sing, though, is the art direction. DigixArt could have leaned into bleakness — plastic seas, sick faces, grey tones — and nobody would blame them. Instead, the world explodes in color: slum-markets dripping with banners, patchwork homes layered like coral reefs, and characters painted in outfits that scream Borderlands more than Mad Max. The screenshot above says it best: a sun-drenched alley where people huddle, suffer, laugh, barter, and survive — all under a canopy of tarps and improvised nets.
That’s the trick. The world could have been black and white, heavy-handed with its message. Instead, it’s vivid, playful, sometimes joyful, while still reminding you it’s drowning in trash.
Reputation is Everything
Not every legacy in Tides of Tomorrow comes from bridges or bottles. Sometimes it’s about how people see you — or worse, how they see the person you’re following. Every action tweaks a set of traits: survivalist if you hoard resources, cooperative if you leave them behind, troublemaker if you stir chaos. NPCs aren’t dumb quest markers; they’ll treat you differently depending on that reputation.
Adrien laughed when I asked about griefers: “If you really don’t like the person you’re following, you can always change. But sometimes it’s fun to live through someone else’s terrible decisions.” Following a selfish player can make your life miserable, but it also gives you the chance to be the one who repairs the damage, earning trust for yourself. It’s reputation rehab, one good deed at a time.
Kevin jumped in during our play with an example: “This is the exact same place, but depending on the previous players, the woman could be harder or easier. If she likes you, she’ll give you a shortcut — if not, she’ll call the guards.” His point was clear: even the same map can spin into completely different encounters, shaped by nothing but the legacy of whoever walked it before you.
That dynamic plays out in smaller touches too. Even random scraps in a chest tell a story: was the previous survivor generous, or did they treat the place like an empty fridge at 3 a.m.? Yup, the chests are shared too, like an account stash in your Diablo game.
And yes, the medicine bottle meme fits here as well. Share it and you’re the hero who left hope behind. Chug it down and you’re the nameless jerk responsible for the next player’s nightmare. Either way, your reputation is sealed, and somebody else will inherit it.
Adventure, Not Action
At first glance, Tides of Tomorrow looks like it could veer into action territory — storms, pirates, stealthy markets — but that’s not where DigixArt wants to take you. Adrien was quick to clarify:
“This is not an action game. There are boat fights, yes, but they play out more like mini-games. The core is adventure — puzzles, exploration, stealth sequences, and variety in the situations you face.”
That variety is where the asynchronous design sneaks back in. In one demo slice, Adrien showed how the previous player hid in a locker, so guards were now paranoid about lockers — forcing him to adapt on the fly. In another, Kevin showed how sneaking through a locked-down market looked completely different from the “friendly” version I had just seen. It’s not scripted alternate paths, it’s the ripples of other people’s choices washing over your story.
And the disease? If it kills you, don’t expect a simple game over screen. Adrien grinned at that point and refused to spoil more than this:
“If you die from the disease, something crazy happens. I can’t tell you what, but it’s not a normal checkpoint reset.”
So when can you jump in? Tides of Tomorrow will first be playable as part of the Steam Next Fest, starting October 2, 2025 at 10 AM CEST, running until around October 20.
The full release is set for February 24, 2026, coming to PC (Steam) and consoles. The campaign runs 10 to 15 hours depending on how much you explore. That might sound short in today’s bloated open world era, but the branching design and asynchronous multiplayer are built for replay — and replay is where the stories really take on a life of their own.
It’s a road trip by water, a narrative experiment disguised as an adventure, and sometimes, yes, a fight for the last bottle of medicine.
Leaving a Mark
Every Gamescom has that one conversation that sticks, and for me it was this couch chat with DigixArt. The game they’re making dares to mess with how we tell stories — and that resonates. After all, this interview and everything I do at Kekbur, is about telling stories too. It’s my attempt to share the experience and emotions of something that already happened, carrying it forward so others can feel a piece of it.
Tides of Tomorrow is not about saving the world with guns or glory. It’s about what you leave behind for the next player. Maybe it’s a bridge fixed, maybe a shortcut revealed, maybe just an empty chest where supplies used to be.
That’s the heart of it — choices passed down, stitched together across players, turning a single adventure into something shared, unpredictable, and weirdly human. DigixArt isn’t a giant studio with endless resources — they’re an indie with the courage to innovate, and that spirit bleeds through every mechanic.
And that’s why this interview is worth remembering. Because one day, when you boot up Tides of Tomorrow, you’ll be staring at a world shaped by someone else’s decisions — hoping they were kind enough to leave you that bottle of medicine.
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