We've done it again, folks. Humanity messed up Earth so badly that the once-thriving planet is now uninhabitable—and instead of trying to rectify our mistakes, we're poodling off to Mars, uncaring and unwilling to face the monumental damage we've inflicted. Typical humans!

It’s a familiar post-apocalyptic story, one we’ve heard so many times it’s almost farcical, but that's the exact sentiment Demagog Studio used as a springboard for its action-adventure game Highwater. Drawing from dark comedy, Highwater finds the absurd, the deadpan, and the offbeat in surviving the end of the world. The result is a recognisable dystopian setting, but with an entirely new attitude.

“It’s an apocalyptic, optimistic comedy,” says Demagog Studio’s CEO and Creative Director Igor Simic. “Our comedy influences include Yes, Prime Minister, Monty Python of course, and anything by Armando Iannucci. But the important thing is that it's optimistic. Highwater is about friendship and sticking together with your friends through trials and tribulations. It's also about how funny it is that people would rather plan to escape to Mars rather than fix what's happening on Earth.”

In Highwater, emergency evacuation to Mars takes the form of a super-rocket reserved only for Earth’s elite. If you’re just a regular person, you’re out of luck, and those left behind must continue to try and survive in a world ravaged by ecological catastrophe.

If that doesn’t seem very fair, well, Highwater's plucky main character Nikos agrees. He wants a seat on that rocket, and so decides to traverse the dangerous flooded zone, infiltrate the walled and uber-elite city of Alphaville, and sneak onto the rocket.

Nikos isn't alone in this endeavor, picking up new friends along the way. Highwater is essentially a road trip-style adventure on water, a ragtag party of people carrying their own hopes and aspirations. Everyone's ultimate goal is the same, though: getting a ticket off a doomed planet that's slowly drowning in water. You'll get to know this revolving door of characters better as you travel with them.

Simic likens Highwater's storytelling and the sense of camaraderie and friendship to the anime One Piece. “In some ways, Nikos—who is also in shorts, and flip-flops—is like a poor man's Luffy,” he says. The Highwater gang even has a boat, albeit not as impressive as the Straw Hat's trusty pirate ship. It's only a small, yellow dinghy—one they can all just about squeeze into—but it serves as home. This trusty boat is how you navigate the waterways of Highwater's sunken world. Exploration is a combination of open-world and guided pathways, allowing you to follow your nose without missing any scenic spectacles. As you voyage through different ruins, your minimap will show icons of optional side quests in white and main quests in yellow.

The history of Earth's demise can be uncovered through environmental storytelling, through talking with fellow survivors, and also through an unexpected passenger (of sorts) on your boat. “The boat radio is also a type of character,” Simic says. "It plays several audio interviews with survivors, plus, the radio host relates news about what's going on in the flood."

"It harkens back to Grand Theft Auto's radio—but unlike Grand Theft Auto, it's not licensed music, but our music," Simic continues. "We make all of our soundtracks in the house with external music collaborators, but it comes from in-house. The stories are from people who now live on Mars but are missing Earth so they call into the station, kind of like Meg Ryan in Sleepless in Seattle.”

This will sound familiar to those who have played Demagog’s other game, Golf Club Nostalgia, a golf puzzler also set in a post-apocalyptic dystopia complete with its own radio station. Simic teases that the connection between the two games doesn’t stop there. “For close observers and those familiar with Golf Club Nostalgia, the host of Highwater’s pirate radio enters the rocket, then rebrands to 'Radio Nostalgia', making Highwater a prequel to Golf Club Nostalgia.”

This in-game radio also stars in Demagog's third game, The Cub, a parkour platformer released earlier this year that tells the story of a mutant boy on Mars. This trio of dystopian adventures shares a melancholic undercurrent—but where Golf Club Nostalgia and The Cub focus on wistful solitude, Highwater's focus on community and comedy makes it an outlier.

Surprisingly, Highwater's combat is a big contributor to its humorous streak. Throughout their adventure, Nikos and friends will need to leave the safety of the waterways for dry land, whether to find supplies, help a survivor in need, or fend off dangerous groups like the Alphaville soldiers. These encounters are inspired by the battle grids of Into The Breach, where limited space makes for compact puzzle-style play.

You’ll often be outnumbered and outgunned, meaning the key to surviving these fights unscathed is to think tactically about how to use the environment around you—and thankfully you have the power of slapstick on your side. “You can pick up a fishing rod and reel in an enemy so they fall into the sea,” Simic says. “You can also use a camera's flashlight to stun an opponent, and later on you can hack enemy robots and use them to your advantage.”

There's a David and Goliath vibe to these face-offs, but maybe a comparison to Tom and Jerry would be more accurate. The comedy stems from the destructive mayhem that follows your actions, a kind of disruptive cheekiness that would make Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin proud. An enemy may be kitted-out in guns and armor, but push over a wooden beam and a great pile of rubble might crush them into dust. If you're out of environmental hijinks, you always have the option of simply cracking an enemy over the head with a wrench, which feels just as satisfying.

Fights are compact, but they take place within impressive set pieces. You'll brawl it out in abandoned supermarkets, overgrown gas stations, rusty factories, and swampy groves overrun with alien plant life. A flooded world is at risk of being, well, mostly vast bodies of boring water, but Highwater always finds ways to keep the journey visually interesting. It's a very colorful post-apocalypse, and you’ve chosen to take the scenic route.

At a casual glance, many of the buildings you explore on foot and cruise past in your boat are a familiar post-apocalyptic sight, relics of another time left to rot in complete disrepair. But in actuality, these buildings are a carefully considered collage of specific inspirations.

“An important influence has been the modernist architecture of Central Europe, especially of former Yugoslavia,” Simic says. “The reason for that is Modernism believed in progress and technology and so forth—but already, all of that architecture seems somehow like ruins, and some of it seems cold, like brutalist architecture. Together with that, we have these references to something that is colloquially now called Silicon Valley ideology—which is basically the same belief, but more biotech, AI, and space exploration."

These architectural inspirations mean more to Simic than purely aesthetics. They carry historical meaning and inform sociological and ideological beliefs. Regarding specific real-life buildings, Simic mentions the Apple headquarters in Palo Alto (designed by Norman Foster) as a blueprint for Alphaville, “a circular city that has a giant wall.”

He also highlights the brutalist Genex Tower (officially known as the Western City Gate) in Belgrade, Serbia. The Genex Tower is quite a cultural landmark, a 36-story skyscraper formed of two towers that connect via a bridge on the highest floors, and topped with a circular structure that was originally meant to be a revolving restaurant. It’s striking—a giant concrete "gate" that overlooks the surrounding residential areas. It’s a monument Demagog has placed in all three of its games, including Highwater, as it holds a personal meaning to Simic.

“It looks cool, but it's also in my childhood. I grew up in the neighborhood of that building,” Simic says. “When people are building a sci-fi world, they usually look at Tokyo or Bangkok or Hong Kong and so forth. My thinking was like, well Jean-Luc Godard shot in some suburb of Paris for his film Alphaville, and he decided, 'Okay, this is sci-fi.' It's the same as when Stanley Kubrick shot Clockwork Orange in a neighborhood in London."

"My thinking is that it will feel authentic if I use a neighborhood where I grew up, and I know every nook and cranny and I say, I just proclaim it: 'This is a sci-fi environment,'" he continues. "I think that's why Highwater looks fresh, because it's not just another version of Tokyo like 90% of sci-fi environments. We basically submerged parts of New Belgrade, and those are the levels.”

Highwater’s authenticity and unique look invites you to stray from the story and poke around its open world. Impressive set pieces and tranquil scenes hide in unexpected corners, waiting to surprise. And there will be surprises. Simic says that players keen on exploration will find some wonders—including two giant statues of some of today's rocket-building billionaires hoping to flee Earth, so get ready for those jump scares.

Highwater's PC release also arrives alongside two DLC stories. The first follows the gang making their way through the Alphaville Ark, a comedic take on Noah’s Ark that’ll take you through a network of rooms occupied by fish, animals, and plants that have all been prepped to leave with the rocket and its passengers. The second story is a sort of pocket-sized sequel that takes place after the rocket has blasted off, where players can see what happened to the humans left behind on Earth.

That second DLC sounds like it's going to pull the heartstrings, as it touches upon one of the more melancholy sentiments of Highwater's main story, the gooey heart at the center of this dystopian comedy. There’s hope in Nikos' adventure, but there’s also loss and sadness. Like many post-apocalyptic stories, Highwater recognises that to survive is not just about finding shelter, food, and protection, but also finding connections with other people through shared adversity. But what about losing that community in hopes of attaining a better life?

“It's a great adventure. A group of friends are leaving and going on a journey,” says Simic, “But it's also kind of sad because you're leaving other people in your community behind. It’s bittersweet.”

Highwater is available now in the Epic Games Store.