2022’s Perfect Tides is one of the most splendid point-and-click adventures ever made. Now, that’s not an accolade you can just throw around in a world that contains Day of the Tentacle, Monkey Island 2, The Longest Journey and Norco, and I do not make it lightly. That astonishing tale of the turbulence of teenage years in the year 2000 is soon to receive a sequel, Perfect Tides: Station to Station, and based on the new, lengthy demo that’s been released this week, it could well be an all-time classic.
Perfect Tides told the story of Mara Whitefish, a young teenage girl living in a small island town, experiencing the trials of adolescence amidst her family processing (or not processing) the death of her father two years earlier. However, this isn’t a morbid or mawkish game, not “a game about grief,” but rather the most loving, delicate and truthful exploration of what it is to be a teenager. I loved it so very much, and it is truly one of the most special games I’ve played. I am, understandably, excited and nervous about a sequel.
Mara is now 18, starting the second year of her college degree, studying in The City (very clearly New York City), far from home and gloriously…fine. She’s fine. When last did you play a game not about someone whose life is completely falling apart, or who excels to superheroic extremes, but instead who is simply muddling along? College isn’t a disaster, and while she struggles with her self-esteem, she’s enjoying her English studies and getting on well with her tutors. She has a mix of friends, some healthy, some potentially unhealthy. She has a long-distance boyfriend, but also a mad crush on a guy who lets her crash on his couch. Nothing is close to perfect, and Mara is still a confusion of shyness and impulsive over-sharing. She’s clumsy with public interactions, prone to being lazy or leaving things until the last second, and too quick to self-critique and yet often over-confident. She’s kind, funny, impatient and selfish—she is, in other words, a person. This is a game about a person.
Being Interested
People, I cannot adequately express my joy after playing Station to Station‘s deeply generous demo. It is not just more of the same wonderful, piercingly honest, and deeply lovely storytelling, but also a game that explores the value of learning, both educationally and emotionally, but also communally. Elaborating on the way the original Perfect Tides had story elements that could play out differently depending upon choices you made or locations you didn’t visit, StS will shape itself around the conversations you have, the topics you explore, and the interests you show. Books you choose to read will unlock new subjects to discuss with others, while conversations will reshape Mara’s views on topics (represented by an ever-more-elaborate polyhedron as her thoughts literally take shape). Writing assignments Mara has to complete are also influenced by the interests she gains, allowing you to take risks at going off-assignment with more maverick angles. And, as I discovered at the overwhelming party toward the end of the demo, there’s no room for just talking about everything to everyone and gaming this—events will occur that will prevent you spamming it all, such that who you chat to and what you learn could be very different from me.
But honestly, to get so into describing these systems undermines how much playing this game never feels like coldly processing the elements of a capital-G Game. And that’s despite the game’s narrator literally communicating the introduction of one of these elements to Mara with “How about another tutorial?” Because even with this, Station to Station feels so compellingly honest, so enticingly engaging, that it feels like a natural part of Mara’s world.
Every scene is jam-packed with details, and pretty much everything that’s been drawn can be looked at. Whether it’s busy streets lined with people, market stalls, stores and street furniture, or the disheveled mess of Mara’s friend Daniel’s shared apartment, creator Meredith Gran has written wonderful details for every element. Where games like this might usually have an incidental detail described as, “The promotional cardboard standee was stolen after a viewing of Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever,” StS‘s reads like this:
“A promotional cardboard standee for the movie ‘Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever’ (2002) lives behind the apartment couch. Although you’ve never seen the film, you know it represents a dearth of creative output in Hollywood, its original script having been rewritten into oblivion – not to mention a devastating $50 million loss for Franchise Pictures and Warner Bros. Entertainment.
“From what you understand, the standee was acquired through great hardship by one of Daniel’s former roommates, who smuggled it home after closing up at the theater of his employ. (Having what Daniel describes as ‘a hulking presence’, he was able to walk it home under his coat in one piece.)
“Since moving out, the standee’s gargantuan owner has repeatedly promised to return for his treasure. The fact that he lives on the West Coast now does not bode well.”
And yes, for any of you too young to remember, Ballistics: Ecks vs. Sever was a real movie starring Antonio Banderas and Lucy Lui.
Details like these offer constant delight. They’re why this demo can take you a couple of hours, if you explore everything and consume all it has to offer. In the same room you can look at a folding chair and are told, “The battered living room camping chair has been in the unfolded position for so long that it no longer refolds. Until recently, an impressive number of crumbs had accumulated in the seat’s deepest point.” Click on that and Mara pipes up, “All gone, in a single dare.”
Reality-Tinted Glasses
You get to experience a whole day of Mara’s life here, from waking up on Daniel’s couch (quickly establishing the deeply unhealthy way she’s allowing herself to be a sort of no-benefits girlfriend to the guy who clearly has never realized she’s got a thing for him), through meeting friends in the street, her day job in the university library, a truly wonderful film studies tutorial session with a nonchalantly inspirational tutor, and an awkward party in the evening. Each is incredibly well-written, and involve no inventory puzzles nor gamed conversations, but rather compelling discussions, the pursuit of interests (primarily anarchism in the demo), and exploration (both inward and outward).
Once again, the game is showing no signs of leaning on nostalgia. Where Perfect Tides so precisely depicted life in 2000, with the normalization of home internet and all its foibles, Station to Station speaks to a post-9/11 America that feels slightly wayward, aimless, but beginning to lay the foundations of its future binary political tribalism. But there’s nothing knowing, no winking about the future, and absolutely no pretense that anything was better about the “good old days.” I can so easily imagine writing of this era, especially if one were 18 at the time, of the glory of its music and its venues. But here, when Mara looks at a small music venue called Patchwork Barbra’s it says,
“…a supposedly legendary concert venue that you’ve yet to explore. Seeing as most of the shows you’d like to attend are either 21+, over $35 for a ticket, or sold out upon announcement, you’ve all but given up on a good time here.”
I know that’s a minor detail, but it really stuck out to me as I played, depicting reality, not rose-tinted memory. And while I’m over-celebrating the most quiet of details, I really want to mention this line that comes up when Mara looks at a graffitied concrete barrier by a river:
“The wall is meant to be a temporary barrier while construction is underway. But it has been here for so long, and carries so much evidence of humanity, that you struggle to imagine the waterfront without it.”
I wish I had the vocabulary to explain exactly what it is about this writing that makes it feel so special. I think it’s the calmness of its delivery, the complete lack of flowery prose or show-offy embellishments, yet within that a sort of gentle poetry. I will definitely think about that phrase to describe something as simple as a wall, that it “carries so much evidence of humanity,” for a good while.
Yes, I’m very aware I’ve spent 1,500 words writing about a demo. And for the avoidance of doubt, no, this isn’t a review of anything! But after playing it, I was bursting with it. I wrote a short snippet about the demo over here, and walked away feeling like I couldn’t be done yet. And I still feel the same, desperate to explore my own memories of university, of the girl with whom I was in love, who inspired me with her ideas and wit, and how I allowed myself to pathetically perform a boyfriend role despite no relationship or reciprocation. That’s what Perfect Tides and even this short-ish glimpse of its sequel do for me: they evoke honest reflection of both the joy and horror of teenage life, but also the vital mundanity between. I adore and want to throttle Mara because, despite not being an American, Jewish or female, so much of her is me. And I imagine you, too.
