Perfect Tides: Station to Station explores seasons of love, hate, depression, and ennui
No one tells you that there is a trick to feeling the existential dread of being lost in life. That trick lies in cities. By putting yourself in an environment that lends itself to a certain purposeful sense of being lost, you can romanticize it. To wander a city is to turn yourself into an explorer, an observer of something greater, something that beats with a palpable magic that might impart some of itself onto you. That wandering is intrinsic to those with a creative disposition. Virginia Woolf haunted the winter streets of London, writing that “to escape is the greatest of pleasures.” Meanwhile Mara Whitefish, protagonist of Perfect Tides: Station to Station, haunts the streets of the Big City through all seasons.
Station to Station re-introduces us to Mara in 2003, now a college student pursuing writing. Three years have passed since we last saw her in 2022’s Perfect Tides, which chronicled one angsty and cringe-filled year of her high school life on the small island of Perfect Tides in four seasonal chapters. As we embark on another four seasons, Mara may be older but she’s none the wiser.
In some ways, the narrative conceit of Station to Station is a harder sell than its predecessor. While developer Three Bees (led by Octopus Pie creator Meredith Gran) was rightfully lauded for the honesty with which it portrayed the crushing anxiety of high school life in the early internet age, there is an inherent nostalgia that players imbued into the experience based on their own memories of what in many ways is the last time of innocence before “real life” catches up with us. It’s less likely Station to Station will draw out that same sense of nostalgia—which is to its benefit, as it’s a much more somber (and yes, still honest) experience because of that.
Mara believes that living in the Big City (yes, it’s New York) as a writer trying to make “things” happen will make everything come together. Yet most of her days are spent working at the school library, writing assignments at the last minute (something I would never do, why would you even think that), getting high with friends, and having terrible relationships with men.
All of this takes the form of a much more aimless (roughly eight hour) experience than 2022’s Perfect Tides. This is still a point-and-click adventure but things have been simplified. There are far fewer puzzles and interaction is done largely through collecting a list of topics that you can then discuss with the people around you. Fair warning, these are mostly art students, so conversations may be a little eye-roll inducing—but that is, in fact, the point. I wish I could say I didn’t have any conversations like that in college but if I wanted that to be the truth I’d have to come down with a case of selective memory loss first. Yet even in all the posturing at big ideas, a kernel of something unpretentious and universally true always comes out.
Sometimes the most interesting takeaways come in description text for the world. As in its predecessor, just being curious enough to click on Mara’s environment will reward fascinating tidbits. That ethos is taken one further with the ability to read books in the world and discuss them with your friends. When read, Mara will give a little monologue about her takeaways. It replicates the constant inundation of new information that occurs in college, and you might actually learn something about Karl Marx, the punk scene in New York, or Ursula K. Le Guin. It rewards curiosity.