Highwater Review – Wading Through The Flood

Highwater was initially released in 2023 as a Netflix-exclusive mobile game and is only now hitting PC, Switch, PS5 and Xbox. It first made waves when its trailer was revealed at 2022’s Summer Games Fest, and I’m glad to say that it’s as beautiful as that reveal made it look. Unfortunately, for a game that bills itself as satirical and story-driven, it has some serious narrative flaws.

Highwater is a 3D adventure game set in a flooded, post-apocalyptic world. You are (usually) controlling Nikos, a boy with a yellow dinghy named Argo, after the ship of the Greek myth Jason and the Argonauts. Guided by a minimalist compass, you explore a region called Hightower to gather resources and work towards your ultimate goal: getting to Alphaville, where the rich city people live.

This is a bleak world, ravaged by a Great Climate Catastrophe and made worse by enduring conflict and resource scarcity. The Alphavillians are rich and powerful, and they hoard supplies found outside the city. Allegedly, they are sending their wealthiest to Mars in a rocket that Nikos wants to be on. The Insurgents are revolutionaries clashing with Alphaville, often violently taking resources from regular people to fuel their conflict. You will end up encountering both groups and more, frequently having to fight and kill them to protect yourself.

You’ll be spending quite a lot of time in combat, so it’s good that the turn-based gameplay is very compelling. The combat system is beautifully balanced to force you to think outside of simple attacks and movement, forcing you to interact strategically with the environment to get through tougher scenarios. You might trap an enemy too strong to face head on, or shove a shopping cart into an enemy to stun them, or push a tree on them to crush them entirely.

Certain weapons allow you to pull enemies and allies alike around the map, and with intelligent positioning and planning, you can thin mobs by yanking hostile characters towards hazards. The UI is finicky, with unclear tutorials, coloured tiles that obscure visually indicated details, and a distinct lack of clarity about factors that limit movement, but overall the combat encounters are fun and just challenging enough. You only need one character to survive each encounter to get through it, and surviving by the skin of my teeth feels extraordinarily good.

While the combat is great, Highwater’s art style is by far the most impressive thing about it, and it’s the very first thing that will strike you. Everything is rendered in low-poly, but each character is visually distinct enough that you’re able to tell them apart even in big, crowded combat encounters. The environments are beautiful, with the glowing sun drawing focus to huge expanses of reflective water, bright green shrubbery and trees, and tall grey buildings sitting in contrast to nature’s slow reclamation of the earth. Plants grow between concrete blocks, and vines wrap around bridges. It’s similar to the dystopian setting of The Last of Us, but with more vivid colours and stylisation, and a lot more water.

As you explore this startlingly beautiful world, you’re accompanied by the tunes on Highwater Pirate Radio. Highwater is very music-heavy, with the host of HPR feeding you original indie tunes as you travel. The host also sometimes interviews people or comments on current events, building the world out further. I found many peaceful moments streaming through the open water towards a vague shape on the horizon, accompanied only by my thoughts and a song. On the flip side, there were a few moments where I realised the developers made the journey between points longer than it had to be so that players could listen to the whole song before reaching their destination, which was a little annoying. It’s a great soundtrack, but it shouldn’t detract from the player experience.

Music isn’t just background noise, though. Like I mentioned above, Highwater has a number of very long musical set pieces where you can just watch characters give haunting performances of the game’s original OST. I was immediately reminded of Kentucky Route Zero’s Too Late To Love You scene, an unforgettable game moment in its own right. Unfortunately, Highwater’s musical scenes do not have the same impact. They don’t add to the story, there’s little meaning to read into them beyond thematic reference and maybe some satire, and if anything, they interrupt the pace of the storytelling.

There are a lot of other things that get in the game’s way, but tonal incongruity is a big one. From the very start of the game, it’s clear that Highwater is a very bleak setting. There are people hanging from expressway signs sticking out of the water. At the first dock you reach, there are dead bodies rotting on the ground, and you step over them to grab a basketball so you can shoot hoops. At first, the game’s dark humour indicates promise for the game’s satirical tone. Unfortunately, the game’s opening chapters are its strongest, and that potential quickly evaporates. The huge amounts of violence Nikos and his friends impart is mostly treated lightly, except for one moment in which he reflects on his actions. Almost any hint of that early satire disappears entirely, with the exception of the books and newspapers you might find lying around as you explore.

The writing, in general, is very muddy. The game makes it clear what your next objectives are through a to-do list, but I never really know why I’m doing something apart from because somebody told me to. It’s not always clear how Nikos knows the characters that join him along the way, and none of them – even Nikos – are fleshed out apart from the occasional mention of vague details.

The game also doesn’t make it clear exactly what it’s trying to satirise, which makes it fall flat. Highwater is littered with literary references, but apart from climate catastrophe and some rote references to dystopian tropes, it’s unclear what it thinks about anything at all. When it comes to the game’s class conflict, the Insurgents steal resources and generally act like jerks, while the Alphavillians are hoarding supplies when they have more than enough. The game seems to land on ‘picking sides for political reasons is bad’, which is disappointing: if the developers wanted to include a very clearly politically-driven conflict, I’d hope they at least make their point with more nuance.

There are moments of beauty in Highwater, most of it instigated by environmental design – I loved coming across surprises and marvelling at how even after catastrophe, human beings continue to do their thing. But unfortunately, as much as I love the game’s aesthetics and very competent turn-based combat, it doesn’t have all that much to say about its complex themes, and finishing it felt like a relief.

Highwater

Pros

• Distinctive and beautiful art style
• Evocative original OST
• Combat is very compelling

Cons

• Writing is muddy and lacking motivation
• Uneven pacing