Bottom Line: Highwater is a gorgeous, sharp-witted narrative adventure that wears its low-poly heart on its sleeve—but its turn-based combat is a rowboat with one oar, coasting on the strength of its writing and world rather than tactical muscle.
The Gameplay Loop
Highwater's rhythm is deceptively simple: sail, scavenge, talk, occasionally fight. You steer Nikos's boat across flooded expanses, docking at islands—the crowns of skyscrapers, the roofs of malls, the last dry inches of a world gone under. You poke around for supplies. You meet people. You banter. Then, when the story demands friction, you drop into a turn-based encounter.
That loop is where Highwater's mobile DNA is most visible. Everything is designed to be picked up, played for fifteen minutes, and put down. The exploration is breezy rather than deep—there's no punishing survival management here, no resource anxiety gnawing at you between fights. Scavenging is more about texture and discovery than mechanical stakes. It's a stroll, not a grind, and it works precisely because the world it's strolling through is so worth looking at.
Combat: The Oar That Keeps Slipping
Here's the honest part. The turn-based combat is Highwater's most-discussed weakness, and the criticism is earned. On paper, the pitch is appealing: skirmishes that reward clever positioning, environmental interaction, and improvisation over brute damage output. You're meant to think laterally—use the terrain, exploit an angle, solve the fight like a small puzzle rather than winning a stat war.
In practice, the puzzle rarely bites back. Encounters are light, forgiving, and repetitive. The tactical vocabulary is thin—once you've seen the handful of enemy types and the tricks that beat them, most fights resolve on autopilot. There's little escalation, little pressure, and almost no failure state to fear. For players raised on the exquisite cruelty of Into the Breach or the granular calculus of XCOM, this will feel less like combat and more like a formality you clear to get the next scene.
But—and this is the crucial caveat—Demagog knows this. The combat isn't the meal; it's the palate cleanser. It exists to punctuate the narrative, to give your hands something to do between story beats, not to test your strategic mettle. Judged as a tactics game, it's mediocre. Judged as narrative connective tissue, it's fine, if forgettable. Your mileage will depend hard on which of those two rulers you bring.
Writing and Character: The Real Engine
Strip away the combat and Highwater's true engine roars to life: the writing. The satire is dry, specific, and occasionally mean in the best way—it skewers the fantasy of billionaire escape-hatch survival with a wit that never tips into lecturing. Nikos's crew are the standouts, a collection of distinct voices whose chemistry carries long stretches of downtime. The dialogue does the heavy lifting that the mechanics can't, and it's strong enough to justify the ride.
The narrative does hit pacing dips. The middle stretch sags as the road-trip structure repeats its beats, and the mystery's momentum occasionally stalls between destinations. A few bugs surface here and there, none catastrophic, but enough to notice. These are the seams of an ambitious indie reaching slightly past its grasp—forgivable, but real.
Interface
The UI is clean and mobile-legible, with large touch targets and an uncluttered HUD that keeps the art front and center. It's functional to a fault—rarely elegant, never in the way. On smaller screens it sings; on a 55-inch TV it can feel a touch spartan.