Tide & Timber preview: a cosy builder with a storm inside
You build a house on an island. Then the barometer falls, and the game shows you what holds.
Tide & Timber looks like a game you have played before. You arrive on an island. You cut wood, you build a hut, you plant potatoes. Music plays, and the light is warm. For the first two hours, we thought we knew exactly what this was.
Then the barometer on the screen began to fall.
A builder with a clock
The game is made by Salt Road, a team of 11 people in Bergen. We played an early version for eight hours, which covered the first year on the island.
The rhythm is simple. A year has four seasons, and each season is about 90 minutes of play. In spring, summer and early autumn, the island is calm. You build, you fish, and you meet the six other people who live there. In late autumn, the storm comes.
The storm is the whole idea. It is not an event that breaks your things at random. It is a system. Wind comes from a direction that you can read from the clouds a day before. Water rises to a height that depends on the moon. Every beam you placed has a strength, and every roof has an angle. When the storm arrives, the game plays it out for ten minutes, and you watch what holds.
What holds
In our first year, we built a pretty house on the beach with a wide porch. The storm took the porch in 40 seconds and the roof in three minutes. We spent the winter in a neighbour's boat shed.
In our second attempt, we built behind a rock, with the short wall to the wind and a steep roof. We lost four tiles. The feeling of walking out the next morning, with the sea calm and the house still there, is the best moment we have had in a building game.
The building tools are exact and friendly. You place posts, beams and boards on a fine grid, and the game shows the load on each piece in a soft colour, from green to red. You can ignore this and build what looks right. The storm will then teach you, which is slower and more fun.
We grew up in houses that were built by people who had seen what the wind does. We wanted to make a game about that knowledge.
Ingrid Aasen, creative director at Salt Road
The people
Six neighbours share the island. Each has a trade: a boat builder, a fisher, a baker, a teacher, a radio operator and a man named Halvard who seems to do nothing, and who knows where the old sea wall was.
They are not quest machines. They have their own houses, and the storm hits those too. In our second year, the baker's chimney fell, and there was no bread for a season. We could have helped her build it better in the summer. We had been busy with our porch.
This is where Tide & Timber goes further than other games of its kind. The island is a shared thing. In year two, the village votes on one large project: a harbour wall, a signal tower or a common store. You give wood and work. The choice changes what the next storm can do.
What we do not know yet
We played one year of a game that is planned to have ten. The studio says each year adds something: a second island, trade by boat, a winter that freezes the harbour. We saw none of this.
We also have one worry. The calm seasons were relaxing the first time and a little slow the second time. A game that asks you to repeat a year needs the quiet parts to stay interesting. Salt Road says the early version is missing about half of the summer events.
| What we saw | Our first view |
|---|---|
| Building tools | Excellent, and easy to read |
| The storm | The best idea in the genre for years |
| Neighbours | Warm and useful |
| Calm seasons | Pleasant, a little slow on a second visit |
| Performance | Smooth on a mid-range PC |
Should you watch this one?
Yes. Many cosy games are about comfort with no risk. Tide & Timber is about comfort that you earn. It treats a house as something that must stand against the world, and it makes you care about a roof.
It comes out in December, which is the right month for it. We plan to play it under a blanket, with the rain against the window, and to build the porch again. This time with a steeper roof.
