work is funat least in fun games like Animal Crossing and Stardew Valley. Whether you’re shaking trees next to anthropomorphic friends or tending crops and flirting with neighbors, these games transform the real grind of labor into a chill pastime. The Tomorrow Children: Phoenix Edition instead, it embraces grind, making for a decidedly boring game where work isn’t necessarily fun, but it can be rewarding.
A short history lesson: The children of tomorrow launched on PS4 in 2016. The free-to-play game emphasized building cities with other players online and relied on microtransactions to stay afloat. Although it garnered a small cult following who praised its artistic success, it couldn’t pay the bills, so its servers were shut down six months later.
In September 2022, the aptly named The Tomorrow Children: Phoenix Edition brought the peculiar game back from the dead. This time it’s a paid title with no microtransactions and peer-to-peer multiplayer, so a server shutdown won’t destroy it again.
in 2016, The children of tomorrow‘s graphics were groundbreaking. The reboot retains the eerie charm of its clay doll characters, its surreal architecture, and its over-the-top lighting effects. The Tomorrow Children: Phoenix Edition doesn’t look so revolutionary now, but in a way it is stands out more against the tide of photorealism that has advanced so much since 2016.
So that makes it all The children of tomorrow an interesting artifact, but as a game it is more complicated.
many games involve a kind of work. The children of tomorrow is about work. It’s not doing your chores to get to the good part. The toil as the main attraction.
Your goal in The children of tomorrow is to carve a new civilization out of a void without character, the result of a science experiment gone horribly wrong. You start by assembling your own town from springs found on islands that occasionally bubble up out of nowhere nearby. Armed with a range of tools, strip these islands bare – chop down trees, crush rocks, spray the soil itself.
Not all at once, though. Your inventory is small at first, so you retrieve four resources at once and stack them in neat piles before returning for more. Extracting these resources is also not frictionless like in other games. It takes a few seconds to look a meter full to get the goods multiplied by dozens of times per island. Then you trade in your treasures for a new building or more tools and get right back to work.
When you need a break, you can always run on a treadmill to generate electricity for your city or defend it from frequent monster raids with a particularly unsatisfactory battle. In fact, you’ll have to do it unless you want all your hard work destroyed, as it can be surprisingly fast. All this adds up to a game where there is constantly something to look at, but none of it is very fun.
That’s a problem, but not deadly: “Fun” is the goal that the vast majority of games aim for, but it’s not the only thing available. Some incredible games instead want to teach you something or make you look at the whole medium in a different way. What The children of tomorrow offers is even more abstract: the thrill of fleeting collaboration, dullness that borders on meditation, and even brief glimpses of the sublime.
You can visit other players’ cities at any time. Other players will appear before you as ghosts, as they do when they visit you, ghosts that briefly work by your side. There are shades of dark souls even Death Stranding in these interactions. You can’t really communicate with other players, but you can help each other. You may never see them, but they will affect your world.
Even the ground you walk on feels like a ghost sliding through reality. Some islands are just that: islands. Others take the form of mind-boggling geometric shapes floating in space or the corpses of giants. Watching these islands slowly emerge from the ground in all their haunting beauty is a highlight The children of tomorrow – a short break from work where you can just see something impossible happen before your eyes.
Can’t say I enjoyed my time with The children of tomorrow, but I’m glad I played it. It’s good to see such a wild experiment on such a large scale, despite the indecent ending of the original. There’s a reason it captivated players the first time around, and while I don’t share their enthusiasm, I think I understand. The children of tomorrow is a reminder that some games can and will succeed at things most don’t even try. I hope the fans can enjoy the fruits of their labor even more this time.
0 Comments