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Narrative & Theme

Confidence

The factual spine (delivery channels, collectible types, satire targets, dev statements) is sourced. The reading of why the writing lands unevenly is interpretation.

Premise

The polar caps have melted. The flooded region of Hightower — renamed "Highwater" as a joke — sits between the ravaged War Zone and Alphaville, a walled Silicon Valley city whose elite board a Mars-bound "Hope mission" rocket in one week. Nikos and a rotating group of friends sail toward the wall intending to stow away. Simić's stated origin: seeing that Elon Musk wants to live on Mars, "I just took that to an absurd conclusion juxtaposed with our own real-life experiences with floods in Serbia, Germany and the US."

The boat is named Argo. The influences Simić names are Homer's Odyssey and the Argonauts "but in a contemporary setting", Ghibli's "non-preachy ecological themes, where catastrophes are simultaneously horrific and beautiful," and Kentucky Route Zero for art direction and cutscene feel.

Delivery channels

Highwater almost never stops play to tell a story. Its four channels, in rough order of word count:

  1. Highwater Pirate Radio — a DJ, guest musicians and news bulletins, playing while you sail. The main worldbuilding organ.
  2. Newspapers — collectible headlines reconstructing the pre-catastrophe chain of events ("There Is Enough Food for Decades", "Redefines Flooding", "Farmland Hit By Extreme Droughts", "We Can Break 100"). The satire's spine: the disaster is narrated in the voice of the people who denied it.
  3. Books and item copy — parody titles (12 Rules on How to Make Your Bed, Don Quixote Grand Budapest, 101 Supplements for Transhumanists) and booster flavour text written as corporate-wellness ad copy.
  4. Party banter and cutscenes — text only; the game ships subtitles in 13 languages and no voice acting at all.

Named satire targets: Orinoco (Amazon, with "genetically modified workers"), Mr. Bozo / BaldOrigin and Muskovitch (Bezos and Musk racing rockets), the "Hope mission" itself, and a terms-of-service gag at the Alphaville border whose achievement is called "Kidney Sold".

Where mechanics and theme agree

  • Slapstick violence. Fishing a mercenary into the sea, dropping a road sign on a soldier — tone delivered by the interaction verbs rather than by dialogue (Environmental Interaction).
  • The final objective is not to kill. The Alphaville riot is won by keeping the class enemy's civilians alive; the last mechanical statement contradicts the premise's bitterness.
  • The cast churns because migration churns. People join, leave, get left behind; the party system enacts the road-movie thesis (Party & Characters).
  • The world is the protagonist, in the director's own words — and the systems agree: the environment is what you operate, and the humans are the least mechanically detailed thing on screen.

Where they don't

Critics split almost exactly along this seam. World, radio and headlines are consistently praised; characters and dialogue are not — "none of them, even Nikos, are fleshed out apart from the occasional mention of vague details" (TheGamer); the game "needs a team of writers who understand character and dialogue a little better" (via Metacritic). One reviewer notes it "doesn't make it clear exactly what it's trying to satirise."

The transmedia trap

Demagog calls its method Constellation Storytelling: multiple entry points into one world across games, animation and music (Return to Earth Universe). A constellation is built from world first and characters second. That is a strength across three titles and a liability inside any one of them — Highwater's world is authored to five decimal places and its people to one.

Radio & Audio · Return to Earth Universe · Party & Characters · Tensions & Lessons