This is a big day for us. TIDEBREAK, a new game from TheBigBois writer Dustin Klaas, is now available on Steam. It’s also the first game TheBigBois has ever published. Dustin built it on his own in the Godot engine, and it launched on October 7, 2026 for Windows PCs.
The setup is simple. You wake up on a low, wooded island with nothing. You punch trees for wood, pick up driftwood and fiber, craft your first tools, and get some kind of camp together before dark. Then the sun goes down, things come out of the water, and the tide comes up a little further.
How a Run Works
Punch trees, collect driftwood and fiber, and work your way up from bare hands to proper tools.
Tools go from stone to flint, copper, iron and finally coralite.
Workbench, campfire, furnace, anvil, smokehouse, walls, gates, spike traps, torch posts, and a tide wall to hold back the sea.
16 species, each found in its own kind of water at its own time of day. Some give you special effects. Roast them, or smoke them for double the food.
Clubs, knives, spears, bows, a sling, a cutlass, an anchor, a harpoon crossbow, a trident, and a blade forged from boss ore.
Beat the three bosses, collect their Tide Sigils, build and light the Beacon, and survive until the ship arrives.
Armor follows the same climb as your tools, from cloth and bark up to copper and iron and then coral, and you can see what you’re wearing on your character. Shrines scattered across the island offer a choice of three powerups at a time, drawn from a pool of 33 that stack with each other.
The Tide Schedule
Days last six minutes and nights last three, so a full run comes in at just under an hour and a half. Here’s how the island changes along the way, according to the Steam page:
| Night | What Happens |
|---|---|
| Every night | The sea rises three metres and stays there. |
| Night 2 | The beach is gone. |
| Night 3 | First boss. Beat it for a Tide Sigil. |
| Night 5 | The rock you started on is now an islet. |
| Night 6 | Second boss. Second Tide Sigil. |
| Night 9 | Third boss, and very little island left. |
| Endgame | Build and light the Beacon, then survive until the ship comes. |
The game’s Steam achievements name the three bosses: the Tidecaller, Old Pincer and the Maw of the Deep. Their drops matter for more than the Beacon, too: one of the weapons is a blade forged from boss ore.
Bring Two Friends
Every island is procedurally generated from a seed, and you can share a seed with a friend so you both play the same island. If you’re playing alone, your run saves between nights, so you don’t have to finish the full hour and a half in one sitting.
Runs That Carry Over
Escaping the island isn’t the end. A successful escape unlocks harder storm tiers. Between runs you can spend Sea Glass on permanent Workshop perks. Achievements unlock cosmetics, and a codex fills up with every fish and creature you’ve found.
There are 31 Steam achievements at launch. They cover beating each of the three bosses, escaping the island, braving the storms, fishing (including landing a Tide King), building up your camp and more. Two of them are hidden, and we’re leaving those for you to find.
Made by One Person, Mostly Out of Code
TIDEBREAK is a one-person project built in Godot. According to its Steam page, every model, sound and effect in the game is generated by code. The result is the clean, low-poly look you can see in the screenshots, and a very small download. The Steam page lists a 500 MB install, with a GTX 960 or RX 470 and 4 GB of RAM as the minimum on Windows 10.
Our Steam Curator Take
TIDEBREAK launched today, so it has no user reviews yet. If you pick it up, leaving a Steam review is one of the best ways to help a solo developer get noticed.
For more gaming news and reviews, check out our reviews section.
