The Tomorrow Children

Did You Know?

• The game received mixed or average reviews according to review aggregator Metacritic.
• SIE had previously expressed disapproval towards the idea of selling their IPs before Q-Games acquired it.

Gameplay

In The Tomorrow Children, players take on the role of projection clones tasked with rebuilding civilization on floating islands after a surreal event called the Void. The game blends social simulation, action, and third-person exploration with cooperative town building and resource gathering. The core loop involves traveling to Void-created islands to collect wood, metal, coal, crystals, and matryoshka dolls, then hauling them back to town. These materials fund the construction and upgrade of buildings, infrastructure, and utilities to house resurrected citizens. Players use shovels, pickaxes, and special Void Powers to reshape the landscape and navigate tricky areas. Towns face periodic raids from giant Izverg monsters, which must be repelled through fortifications and teamwork. Buses shuttle players and resources between town and islands. The Phoenix edition offers solo play with AI Comrade companions. The main goals are growing the population and expanding the settlement. Matryoshka dolls from the Void become new citizens, unlocking more workspace and building options. Players also customize their town’s layout, buildings, and appearance as it evolves.

Development

The Tomorrow Children first appeared at Sony’s Gamescom 2014 press conference in August of that year. Engadget called it a blend of Minecraft-style cooperative construction, social economics, and a Soviet-themed post-apocalyptic setting. The game runs on a custom engine built by Q-Games, designed to mimic the look of Pixar’s pre-rendered CGI using real-time 3D graphics. This engine makes heavy use of the PlayStation 4’s Async Compute capabilities and introduces advanced lighting methods, including cascaded voxel cone ray tracing. That technique simulates lighting in real time with more accurate reflections than screen space reflections, enabling global illumination without pre-baked data. It handles both direct and indirect light, with up to three light bounces per pixel—compared to one bounce in Pixar films. The world is built from layered depth cubes, which are converted into polygons as needed, allowing deformable landscapes. A public beta ran from June 3 to June 6, 2016. Voice work was handled by Glen Gathard and his team at Shepperton studios. On July 6, 2017, just six months after launch, the developers announced the game would shut down on November 1, 2017, citing poor monetization and server costs. After the shutdown, producer Cuthbert noticed fans still sharing screenshots and videos. On November 9, 2021, Q-Games announced they had bought the IP from Sony Interactive Entertainment—an unusual move, as Sony had previously been reluctant to sell its properties—and planned to rebuild and relaunch the game. The re-release, titled The Tomorrow Children: Phoenix Edition, arrived in 2022. It removed the need for a central server and microtransactions, making the game playable offline, and switched from a free-to-play model to a paid one.