The Tomorrow Children is an online strategy game where you collaborate with other players to build, explore and develop communities. Unusually, it uses social economics and a Soviet Union-themed post-apocalyptic dystopia as the setting. You play a clone girl on a mission to rescue Russian Dolls that contain the lost human DNA and rebuild the population.
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Play involves exploring the world to find places to mine materials and find people to work with to transport them back to your home base. As you explore, you discover the rules of the world and start to make progress in accruing the resources you need to expand your tribe. At the same time, you are provided with tools to work by the state. There is also a black market for more powerful tools and special powers. You can craft items by completing mini-games.
From your central social space, islands arrive nearby as time passes, a little like the fiction of the Faraway Tree. You visit these islands to get resources and items, but only have a limited time before they move on. This provides a steady stream of opportunities to gain materials, but also new spaces to explore and work on with other players.
The game's visuals are striking and emphasise utilitarian technology and brutalist architecture. But it's more than visually unusual. It's unlike other games (apart from Sky Children of Light, perhaps) where you work for your own benefit, or squirrel away loot so you can survive in the future. You soon find yourself not only working with other players but also working for the benefit of the online society you are part of.
Other players don't talk to you directly but appear in your game when they can help you (or you can help them) in various ways. Like Journey, the communication is nonverbal, but this serves to highlight the social connection created by the game. This makes it an online game where you aren't pestered or surrounded by other players and ensures a calmer, and actually more connected, experience.
The result is an online game that is unusually about helping other players. Because there aren't individual rewards, players focus on teamwork and altruism. This was true in its original release in 2016 and remains the case in the 2022 updated version of the game.
