There’s a lot about Perfect Tides: Station to Station’s Mara that I find relatable. Like me, she’s recently moved to a place simply called “the City” from the middle of nowhere, and like me, she’s an avid writer. But these biographical details aren’t the important thing; it’s the way she’s painted by the game’s incredibly sharp writing where I start to feel uncomfortably seen. There are a lot of characters in media that are awkward or socially anxious, but few that are drawn with such piercing specificity.
The point-and-click game is minimalist in its mechanics. Consisting mostly of conversations, it’s broken up by a few puzzles, object interactions, and minigames. This is not a complaint: it’s in talking to people that the game shines, because it’s how we get to see most of Mara. And she’s such a realized and resonant portrait of a person that I found myself grasping at where we were different as a coping mechanism against spending the whole time introspecting. I pride myself, for example, on never having had an awful boyfriend. In this, surely, I could find some self-soothing superiority over this poor video game character.
The dynamics of Mara’s relationship with her controlling, older, long-distance partner are sketched with both narrative and mechanical thoughtfulness. In one conversation, a health bar suddenly appears, and you must navigate a particularly difficult conversation without losing all of your hearts, some of which you gain only if you’ve spent time nurturing other connections. It’s one of many neat metaphors, and combined with the clever moment-to-moment writing, led to a particularly notable moment, which wrenched an “oh, for fuck’s sake” out of my mouth in real life.
It was then that I had completely bought into Station to Station . I thought I had the shape of it. Dear relatable Mara and her messy relationships that I could hold as a simplifying buffer between us. But the game wouldn’t settle for simplicity.
Aside from conversation, the other important mechanic is Mara’s writing. These manifest in assignments for school, guest blog posts, and, in one real low moment for Mara, an overly involved forum post, and you’ll need to combine topics together to complete the piece in question. These topics include the city, music, and sex, and they level up as you talk to people and experience the world. It’s a pretty simple but effective representation of how writing works: you learn things through living and then combine ideas into, hopefully, something new and expressive.
There’s one piece that works differently. Mara writes a story that is clearly a thinly veiled allegory for her own life, and a tutor gives her some relatively harsh feedback. For the rest of the game, the story looms in the back of her mind. You can’t fix this just by combining a thought your friend had about movies and your own ruminations on death caused by your ailing grandmother. But each of those might help a little as you chip away at it bit by bit. Without getting too self-indulgent about my own recent writing experiences, suffice to say Station to Station had once again skewered me. I had Mara work on it whenever I could, every time reminded of my own festering project and the trust necessary to wait and address it slowly.
At this point in the game, it’s clear that the aforementioned partner is not Mara’s only problem. In fact, most of her interactions with other characters are marred in some way or another. I, for one, would simply not get involved with these people! But again, the game resists simplicity. Although it always presents harmful interpersonal dynamics honestly and without excusing bad behavior, it absolutely refuses the idea of shutting yourself away to avoid them. Because you would miss out on too much. Too much joy, too much connection, too much potential.
In one of the only conversations in the game that feels purely uncomplicated and productive, a character tells Mara “you just have to risk it with someone and see.” Station to Station argues, over and over again, that being open to others, despite the risk of awkwardness, and of not being treated well, is worth it. Mara is naive, and not very good at knowing what she wants, let alone asking for it. And she does get hurt. But she also lives a much more beautiful life when she doesn’t close herself off to experiences and people. She deals with the consequences, and through this she learns and grows and flourishes. My knee-jerk perceived superiority in being avoidant is suddenly the crack through which Station to Station has sunk its claws into me. I will be thinking about it for a very long time.
There’s a lot more I could talk about, like the multiple excellent musical interludes, or the hugely exaggerated animations that feel genuinely expressive while also being consistently comedic. I could even complain bitterly about some of the incidental environmental puzzles and the way they ground the story to a screeching halt if you happened to miss one small interaction point. But what kept me thinking about the game long after the credits rolled was its emotional honesty and the emotional honesty it demanded of me while playing it.
After playing the game, I stewed for a couple of days, thinking about Mara, myself, and one particularly memorable bit of karaoke. And then it hit me: I never finished Mara’s rewrite. No matter how important it felt in the moment, it turned out to be much less crucial than Mara and I opening ourselves up and accepting the consequences, good and bad.
Perfect Tides: Station to Station is out now on PC.
