This week I played Octopus Pie author Meredith Gran’s Perfect Tides, a visual novel/point-and-click adventure game about being an internet-addicted teen girl in the year 2000:
That either makes you go ‘ugh’ or ‘omg mood’ and no one can tell you otherwise, but it nailed it for me, this game hit so many good notes. To just cover a few:
It walks the line really well of “this is a nostalgia game made by a 40-something” and “it takes itself as seriously as its main character would”. Mara is an idiot, for sure, makes naïve mistakes and takes seriously what fundamentally isn’t. But none of that tone is disparaging, how much she suffers at the hands of a social order than is utterly normal but that she still cannot grasp is so felt so keenly despite your own position of greater maturity & knowledge. Some pain transcends.
This btw is aided by the developer commentary - Mara receives a poem from her fanfic forum boyfriend which hits hard on the cringe line but that effect becomes raw as fuck when you learn that is an *actual poem* Gran wrote for someone online when she was 16, plundered from the past and enshrined in the digital museum that is this game. Perfect Tides is 50% autobiographical which really helps sell it.
There are so many little touches of ways the characters act, the things they do, they show the depth of the author’s emotive insight - character motives are not just ‘depressed teen’ or the like. Many would be spoilers to list, so Ill just note a super minor example where Mara gets stuck arguing with mom over a comparison (about the Titanic film lol) that she doesn’t remotely believe in because…like arguing with her is her default state, and she is in too deep, can’t bac kout of the argument now right? This sounds so trivial, its hard to communicate why it matters, but Mara is made up of distinct little instincts & desires like these that are core to how real she feels.
Related to that a “Meredith Gran” specialty is how many of these character touches are never explicitly stated. Mara self-narrates so she is a little direct, but the other characters all have a ton going on that can only be inferred - like what Mara/people in general have to do to socialize in real life! Personal nod to her not-boyfriend Jason who has this desperate desire for everything to be “okay” and fully resolved the moment a problem comes up as he can’t handle the anxiety of unresolution, a trait Mara never picks up on but drives several of his scene - I absolutely share that instinct.
Finally its batshit hilarious, between the era references and Mara’s tilted worldview and the inherent insanity of teenagers and the comedic timing of animations, scene shifts, its funny in so many different ways.
My only complaint would be that the ‘internet/reality’ dichotomy is not truly taken advantage of - it sets itself up as this sort of split story, of Mara being a part of an active online social circle contrasting her grim reality, but that online social circle falls away halfway through and doesn’t play as large a role as one expected. This is of course a product of development - Gran had more online content, additional concepts and a branching path for the main online romance, but it got scrapped due to time & narrative bloat. When something is this indie its hard to fault, you easily forgive these mistakes, but its there all the same.
So yeah, go play Perfect Tides. Its amazing, just kickstarted a sequel, and tiny games like these need all the support they can get.
