Perfect Tides (2022)

properly this is "young adult" fiction, right? it's a long time since I read a young adult novel and maybe I'm an ignorant dink but this feels so mature. and, I mean, technically the hunger games is young adult writing and it's full of murder and war crimes and complex dissections of performativity (or so I gather), so what do I know. my point being: perfect tides did a real good job of evoking what it's like to be a teenager, and what it feels like to be an adult reflecting on having once been a teenager, in ways I don't think I would have picked up on as an actual young adult.

as an old adult, this hit in some of the ways I wanted night in the woods to hit. I am, once again, a guy wot grew up in the 90's in a small town, where tourism is 60% of your economy and it's all done over the summer, and a bit more during your fall festival (the ratios are different, though; my norcal beaches were cold and more of a draw for hardcore surfers, so the most crucial weekend for all the businesses on main street was pumpkin festival; one pfest, max at m.coffee thought he'd save money by only selling pumpkin ice cream out the window instead of opening the shop, couldn't keep up with the demand, and had to cut cafe hours in half for a year). where nitw's veer into genre fiction at the end worked for me thematically but not dramatically, perfect tides is willing to just be a young adult story, far closer to bo burnham's eighth grade even than speak (no sexual assault), much less stand by me (certainly no "youse boys wanna see a dead bodyyyy?") (though that deer at the end had to be a nod, right?). there's no hook, it's just a year in mara's life.

my town was, ultimately, a lot bigger than mara's island, but that feeling, that "stand in one place long enough and you'll run into everyone you know," is palpable. also "there are only five restaurants in this town and I've never been inside two of them." also "literally every adult still sees you frozen in amber as a six-year-old, why on earth did their mental images keep updating until six and stop there?" (I got more "[big sister]'s brother???" than mara gets likened to timothy; I guess I prefer that to mara's deal of forever being her dead father's tragic child.) things were never as bad for me as for mara, who seems to genuinely have no friends, and the handful of connections she makes keep moving away, but it resonates. I didn't have many close friends, and I fell out with some, and others did move. I get it. mara's inability to grasp that her overwhelming feelings of abandonment are actually really solipsistic, or that they are at least partially displaced grief over her father's sudden passing two years prior, are never actually acknowledged, and that's to the game's credit. they are things the adult who made it is aware of, and expects other adults to see sans underlines.

that's not to even mention how several of adventure gaming's flaws are incorporated into the design: wandering from place to place to see what, if anything, has changed since you solved the last puzzle? yeah, you do that in a small town, desperately hoping for anything to be different. plopping down at the computer just in case that's what triggers the passage of time to the next phase? that was every summer, fam. still having a pocket full of random shit you put in there last spring and never found a use for? ok maybe that's weird but I did it, too. even the feeling of not knowing what you're supposed to do next feels correct; half the game is trying to find something to do.

I loved it. I am amazed at the confidence. this is webcartoonist meredith gran's first video game!(?!) and it's full of nods that people exactly like me can appreciate: the fact that mara a) has the novelization of lucasarts' the dig sitting next to her bed and b) obviously hasn't actually read it; the sierra-style interface with icons that change color with the season (the "walk" icon even changes outfits!); the bit where jackson explains how to use your inventory that culminates in one of the game's dirtiest and funniest jokes, and serves as the only fourth wall break; the narration existing in a grey area between functional, parser-style narration, mara's internal thoughts, years-later mara's reflections, but occasionally breaking into hilarious extremes of one or another (two faves: upon finding an unopened bottle of beer: "this could be big for you, mara." and: upon doing some thing she is normally to socially awkward to do, either talking to a stranger or asking her brother for a favor, I forget which: "you've got this. I love you.")

it's just all killer no filler, or all filler and that's the point. getting station to station immediately.

Having been there myself, I'd say that Perfect Tides expertly captures the drudgery of being a weirdo loner teen, bodily dragging herself through high school with the residual energy of an untreated anxiety disorder. If I had any less distance from the subject, it would probably be excruciating to play.

As is though, I'm really enjoying it! Super interesting to see a retro-styled point and click adventure built on the more modern Telltale/Life is Strange design, with pixelated 2D environments used as scaffolding for interpersonal drama instead of endless inventory puzzles.