The Tomorrow Children: Gaming’s first socialist experiment

When Q-Games was told about the PS4, its architecture and its aims as a piece of hardware, the studio made an immediate and formative decision to build a game directly tied into what the PS4 was built to do.  It was a console built to foster a community, to encourage sharing and become a microcosmic entity that channels the Internet as a whole. The Tomorrow Children, therefore, is a project built around making the most out of our new interconnected, cyber-social community.

Thing is, the game is also about Marxism, and is aesthetically lined with a distinctly Communist Russian vibe. With Minecraft acting as a reference point, The Tomorrow Children wants you to work with others to achieve goals claim new lands, build new landmarks. It aims to cultivate a new virtual society, but in a self-aware way ‘a game-like virtual society’, according to Q-Games founder Dylan Cuthbert. It’s ambitious we hope enough people adopt the game’s bleak aesthetic to make Cuthbert’s dream reach fruition…

The Tomorrow Children wants to give you absolute freedom built on the Minecraft model with a Soviet edge, the game is an experiment in free thought

MONSTER MASHER
The Tomorrow Children lets you do what you want, when you want. If you want to spend the whole game harvesting and constructing, you can. Players more interested in combat and defence, fear not: your city will come under attack from roving monsters, and you can build defensive structures or robots to keep it safe from weird ants, Godzilla-inspired mega-lizards and God knows what else.

BLACK MARKET
You can find old American currency dotted around the map. This faux-Capitalist money can be traded in at the Black Market, the vendors of which will give you infinitely better gear that can reward you with resources straight away. But using the Black Market comes at a price and grows this dark economy, potentially at the expense of your own government but maybe you want that?

MIND OVER MATTER?
The game’s bleakness is the result of a Soviet experiment gone awry in the fictional Sixties Russian scientists tried to merge all human consciousness into a singularity and failed. The result? The white void that coats the planet. 100 years later, when you’re playing, you can save human souls (imprisoned in Russian Dolls) to repopulate the globe. The more humans you collect, though, the more work there’ll be looking after them…

Games IGN News IGN Previews IGN PS4 VideoGames