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The Tomorrow Children sticks you in a Cold War-era USSR set in The Matrix

by: Randy -
More On: The Tomorrow Children

Cold War-era Soviet Russia's whole aesthetic is so foreign to us Americans that it might as well be pure fantasy. Not like the United States didn't have its own overblown propogandous views of itself from the 1960s to the 1980s (see every '80s action movie ever), but Soviet Russia still manages to evoke a just-off-the-geiger-counter weirdness when you look at it.

The Tomorrow Children harps on that dark Soviet fear that '80s babies—like myself—grew up with. We were told to crawl under our desks if there was ever a nuclear attack. I used to look at the global map in grade school and think that America couldn't possibly win in a fight against the USSR simply because it had more letters in its acronym and because it was just so huge on the map, even compared to the USA, an already huge country.

This is the kind of baggage I have to unpack right now, watching this Tomorrow Children gameplay. Thanks, brain.

If it looks like The Tommorrow Children are building on the shiny, flat, white surface of The Matrix, you're not too far off. All of humanity's consciousness has melted into a dismal mass known as the Void. You're not rebuilding the planet. You're rebuilding the very fabric of mankind. Super weird. And I super kinda like it.

It's a survival game, of sorts. You gather resources, build infrastructure, and repopulate that infrastructure with...with something like rehydrated matryoshka dolls. You know, those Russian nested doll things? Told you it's a little weird.

The Tomorrow Children is close. It's on PlayStation 4 this coming Tuesday, September 6.