(Note: the following review was originally posted on my now-deleted Substack profile on Feb. 3 of this year)
Last
month saw the release of PERFECT TIDES: STATION TO STATION, a sequel to 2022’s
acclaimed PERFECT TIDES. The brainchild of cartoonist/animator Meredith Gran
(of the webcomic OCTOPUS PIE fame), and developed by her Three Bees indie
animation studio, this is a game I’ve long been looking forward to playing. I
fell in love with the first PERFECT TIDES shortly after it was released in 2022
(a friend recommended it to me), and I was very happy when this new game was
announced a few months later, to the extent that I not only became a backer on
Kickstarter * (which I almost never do), but I even played the demo in early 2024 (which I
also almost never do). So you could say that I’ve been eagerly awaiting this
release for close to two and a half years now. And it didn’t disappoint!
For
those who never had the pleasure of playing the first game, PERFECT TIDES was a
point-and-click adventure game somewhat in the mold of the old Sierra
Games-type titles of the 80s and 90s, and it put you into the shoes of Mara
Whitefish, a socially awkward, insecure and unpopular 15-year-old Jewish girl.
In that first game Mara was a high school sophomore and aspiring writer who
lived on the East Coast island known as Perfect Tides (itself somewhat modeled
after the real-life Fire Island). Set in the year 2000, the game chronicled a
year in Mara’s life, and was divided into four acts, each based around one of
the seasons, starting with spring and ending in winter.
Part
of the difficulty inherent with sequels is that you want something that feels
in continuity with what came before it, but also something that doesn’t
slavishly just recycle the original, something which can also stand on its own
two feet. STATION TO STATION achieves the former by bringing back many of the
key staff from the first game: aside from Meredith Gran once again handling
writing and directing duties, Soren Hughes has returned as the game’s
environmental designer, and Daniel Kobylarz is back taking on the music, to
cite just a few examples, though there are some new faces as well. So in terms
of writing, game art and music, it certainly instantly brings to mind the first
game of the series. Also, it once again adopts the same four act structure of
the first game, with each act representing a season, starting with spring and
ending in winter, so that once again you’re playing another year in the life of
Mara Whitefish.
However,
in other ways the new game has many different elements that set it apart from
the first. For starters, the interface has been streamlined. In the first game,
you would use the mouse wheel to change the on-screen cursor, which had four
different settings: an eyeball if you wished to examine something, a mouth if
you wanted Mara to talk to someone, a hand if you desired to interact with
something, and a little icon of Mara if you wanted to move around the screen (I
know this interface sounds horribly awkward and clunky, but you’d be amazed how
quickly you adapt to it). With STATION TO STATION, the cursor has been greatly
simplified. Now you simply left click to move Mara where you want her to go
(and if there’s an object she can interact with or a NPC she can speak to, the
cursor color goes from white to red), and right click to examine people,
objects and environments. Although the cursor interface in the first game was
not without its charm, the new cursor set-up in the sequel makes for a much
smoother gaming experience, in my opinion.
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| The new stats screen |
Another
big difference between the two games is the gameplay. The first game was more
of an inventory-based puzzle game, where you often had to find certain items
and use them in specific ways (and sometimes combinations) to move the story
along or solve puzzles (this could lead to some frustrations for the first
playthrough at least, in that not doing things like “not giving a seemingly minor
background NPC a bag of potato chips in Act I locks you out from completing a
major story event in Act IV”). In STATION TO STATION, there is still an
inventory system, but it’s far more scaled back and not used very often.
Instead, the game has more of an RPG feel. Mara now has seven stats,
represented in the form of topics that interest her (The City, Movies,
Anarchism, Music, Sex, Drugs, and Death), that can be raised in various ways
over the course of the game, thus opening up new dialogue options. How you
raise these stats varies: sometimes it’s based on actions you undertake, or
conversations you have with characters, or books you read, and so on. That’s
another big difference between the two games, in that the dialogue system has
been deepened. If you hover the cursor over an NPC and it changes to a dialogue
bubble, that means you can hold deeper conversations with them, asking them to
comment on other characters in the game or on the seven aforementioned topics
(the way it works is you just select what you want to ask them about from lists
off Mara’s cellphone: you can even do this to Mara herself to see how she
currently feels about the people she knows and the topics that interest her).
Another more fleshed-out system is the in-game use of computers. In the first
game, Mara did have a computer she could use, but it wasn’t really super-interactive,
and mainly just functioned for a way for her to converse with her friends
online and/or to move the story forward. But in STATION TO STATION, now when
you access a computer, you can work on writing various papers (be it for school
or otherwise), chat with your friends, explore the web, and check your email
(doing all these things can also increase your stats). Finally, the game also
introduces a system where Mara can collect and read books, which also can
increase your stats and open up new dialogue actions/events: Mara can hold up
to five books at once, and can swap them with other characters she encounters.
The
third big difference is the setting. In the first game, the action was mainly
situated on the island of Perfect Tides itself, though you did get to see a bit
of the Mainland. But STATION TO STATION greatly expands the size of Mara’s
world. The date is now 2003 (three years after the first game), and Mara, now
18, is a Freshman at State University of Creative Studies, or SUCS for short.
Thus, the main setting is now The City (also known as “The Big City”), a
thinly-veiled version of New York City. However, the game also spends a fair
amount of time on the Mainland as well (where Mara lives when not on campus),
so as a result, we get to see and learn a lot more about the world Mara lives
in (also, and keeping with the RPG theme, the game even has a world map). The
island of Perfect Tides itself, on the other hand, while receding in the
distance in physical terms, pretty much mentally attains a mythical, almost
Avalon-like reputation, and it’s funny how Mara almost yearns at times to
return there, in light of the how much time she spends in the first game
wishing to escape from it.
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| The delightful world map; I love how the mainland is fish-shaped |
Like
some of the other modern point-and-click adventure games I’ve played over the
last few years, such as PENTIMENT and DREAMS IN THE WITCH HOUSE (the latter
even more appropriate to mention here, in that it also took place in a
university setting), your chief enemy in STATION TO STATION is Time itself.
Each act is divided into four days, and these days are (usually) further
divided into morning and evening segments, and you need to be able to figure
out how best to make use of your time, as Mara typically only has time to read
one book and work on one paper a day, and other events (like spending time on
the computer or taking part in various activities with your friends) can also
use up your all-too precious time. This is something, I feel, that gives the
game replayability: during my initial playthrough, I often found myself
thinking things like, “What if I had read that other book instead of the one I
actually chose to read? What if I had had Mara spend the day hanging out with
her friends rather than study at the library?” And so on and so forth.
Over
the last four years or so, Meredith Gran has become one of my favorite artists
and fiction writers, so this game really is the best of both worlds for those
like me who enjoy her art and writing: there’s a lot of text in this game (200k
words according to her recent dev blog), and it really brings the game to life,
with a lot of scenes achieving great degrees of humor, sadness, and
emotionality (sometimes all in the same scene). Speaking as someone who was
also a college student during the time depicted (though I was just wrapping up
my college experience rather than beginning it), the writing really does a good
job capturing the zeitgeist of the era. Meanwhile, on the art front, it’s
great to see Gran’s creations come to life through animation. Mara Whitefish
remains one of the more compelling computer game protagonists I’ve ever
encountered, both flawed and loveable in equal measure; you’ll often find
yourself wanting to give her a hug when she’s dealing with heartbreak over yet
another breakup with a bad boyfriend, or dealing with the fallout with life’s
numerous problems, even at those times when she’s her own worst enemy (I also
like how, much as in the first game, she changes her look each season: in
STATION TO STATION I think her best look is in the summer portion of the game,
that outfit suits her nicely).
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| See what I mean about that summer look? I'd wear that shirt |
I enjoyed how, as mentioned above, the game expands on Mara’s world, and as a voracious reader and book nerd I love how Mara now has the ability to read and assimilate books **. Some of the books she can read I’ve read myself over the years, but there were some I haven’t read that sounded pretty interesting the way they were described in-game, so I might have to check some of those out at some point. As mentioned before, Soren Hughes has returned to do the game’s backgrounds, and once again they’ve conjured a masterclass in pixel art, creating timeless environments that are both vividly colorful and bursting with life, the perfect backdrops for the characters to play out their scenes against.
And
what scenes they are! There are so many great moments, which can range from the
quiet (a character visiting a cemetery and having a contemplative moment) to
the bombastic (a karaoke performance at a bar, one of the game’s highlights).
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| I take back any bad thing I've ever said about Queen |
I
also should bring up the music. The soundtrack to the first PERFECT TIDES I
personally rank as one of my Top Ten favorite gaming soundtracks, and I’ve
spent many an hour listening to it during my leisure hours at home or when
driving back and forth from work, and what’s really incredible about it was
that it was such a late addition: I’ve read that Daniel Kobylarz was brought
onboard somewhat late in the game’s development, and thus didn’t have a lot of
time to create music, hence why the game only had an abbreviated 22 tracks
(some of which were quite short, and which were reused in the game often). But
with STATION TO STATION he had much more time to work on the game’s music, and
it really shows: a whopping 41 tracks (almost double the amount of songs from
the first game), some of which are substantially longer and more developed. And
while I’m not sure if any of them will grow to be as iconic in my mind as some
of the songs I most love from the first game (“Downtown,” “Mara’s House,”
“Mainland,” “New Reunion,” and “Island at Night” spring to mind), already many
of these new songs are starting to grow on me, and I’ll need more time to
absorb them all. However, I think I can at least name some initial faves: “The
City” and “Work/Study” are really great (it probably helps that I heard them a
lot when I played the demo and thus they’ve been with me for around two years
now), “Academy Diner” (which to my ears sounds perhaps the most like it could
have fit in very well in the first game’s soundtrack), “The King’s Men,”
“Crashing at Mom’s,” "Morning Headline," “Towel Girl on the Hook” (I have no idea if it’s
intentional, but this one gave me strong “Sound and Vision” vibes, which would
be appropriate for a game that I’m presuming took its subtitle from the David
Bowie album of the same name), “Morning Headline,” “Fried Grease and Sea Air,”
“Mainland 2,” “Swimming,” “Lazy Days Gone By",” “Fry of the Atlantic, Take
Heart!,” and “End Credits.” But almost all the songs have something memorable
going on, and they stick in the mind afterwards.
The
things I didn’t quite care for as much in the game were pretty minor, really. I
found I struggled a bit with the "writing papers" aspect of the game, though that might
be more of a mark against me: the way it works is that you choose a primary
topic, then a secondary topic, and Mara automatically writes the paper. But
it’s not always clear what topics will work best for whatever assignment you’re
working on at the time, and other times where I did correctly figure out which
ones were appropriate, sometimes they just so happened to be ones where my stat
level in that topic weren’t particularly high (while on the subject, I think it
would be nice if the game let you knew what the max was for each topic, so you
have a better idea of where you stand: I think the highest I got for anything
was a 5 in regards to “The City”). I also felt that the “book swapping with
friends” mechanic was a bit underutilized: in theory I thought it sounded
pretty cool, the idea of swapping books with friends, because I thought it would
lead to events where you could later ask them what they thought about the book
they gave you, and vice-versa, but in practice I can only recall four actual
times where I could swap books with another NPC (not counting the girl at the
library desk or the curbside book vendor in the City’s main hub), and I found I
was never able to swap books back, so I would advise gamers to use caution
here: if you swap a book with someone, you might never see it again. Although
the game has its atmospheric moments, I found the first game had a bit more
going for it in that department, and I think it might come down to familiarity:
Perfect Tides struck me as a very unique and exotic location, one I hadn’t
really encountered in my many years of gaming, while the City was perhaps a bit
more familiar (though still interesting in its own right). I also felt that the
transition of the seasons carried more weight in the first game, partly because
the first game was a bit more exterior-focused while the new game is more
interior-based, so that depending on what act you were in the island of Perfect
Tides was either very populated or border-line deserted (one of my favorite
memories of PERFECT TIDES was the evening scenes in winter, having Mara walk
around the deserted city streets at night, the snow crunching under her boots
and the warm glow issuing forth from the windows around her, while the song
“Island at Night” played melancholically in the background). That reminds me,
in the first game, whenever a new season began, you got a little whimsical
animated title card appropriate to that season’s theme, while the new game just
says the season’s name in white lettering on a stark black background . . .
though I suppose, now that I think about it, in some way that’s maybe kind of
appropriate, in that Mara was still very young and childish in the first game,
whereas in this game she’s older and a bit more serious (emphasis being on the
words “a bit”).
My
first playthrough of the game came out to a little under 16 hours (partly
because I’m anal about inspecting everything), so on the whole I would consider
this game to be a bit longer than the first game (which typically takes me
around ten hours to play through). The first game had three different endings
depending on your cumulative score, but as far as I can tell this game only has
one ending (I may be wrong on this count, but I’ve checked some of the
playthroughs on YouTube and they all seem to end the same way my game did). I
would also like to mention that while most of the occasional mini-games are
pretty self-explanatory, I had a devil of a time (and at least I know I’m not
alone on this) on a certain mini-game that requires you to play the piano; I
suppose it might help more if you can play an instrument and know how to
actually read sheet music, but I literally had to watch a video of someone
doing it online and take careful notes so that I could then replicate it myself
(and this all gave me flashbacks to the “developing photographs in the school
dark room” mini-game of the first game).
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| Yes, that is exactly how my hair typically looks |
