Perfect Tides

Amazing adventure game. It's a bit of a miracle how faithfully it invokes classic staples of the genre while feeling very modern to play. The story is incredibly effective and serves as a perfect time capsule to the ICQ and MSN messenger era of early dial up internet.

As someone who was also a teenager in the '00s- this captures that time and that way of being in the world PERFECTLY. Excellent writing, compellingly realistic characters, lots of laughs (and some crying). I actually played this AFTER playing the Station to Station (which is also amazing) so if you're also coming to this one after playing the second game, don't worry- they actually really work even out of order. Beautiful job making two stand alone games that still intertwine beautifully.

OK. So me and a friend just finished this. I've been a fan of Gran's other work, Octopus Pie, for about 15 years now, so there's definitely a fair amount of bias from me. The worst aspects of the game are inventory puzzles or leaps of logic to advance the story. At most, I encountered them twice. If you're stuck, look up a walkthrough. I do appreciate bucking the adventure game narrative with most of the 'quests' being optional. The game is a time capsule of the late 1990s, a view of what it's like to grow up, and a memoir of sorts. Not of exact experiences, but feelings, and a path through life. It is unique, amongst what is on Steam, and it's worth playing.

some messy pixel art but top tier chracter writing great stuff!

Monumental slice-of-life from one of the best writers in games right now. Perfect Tides is immediately so charismatic that it overrode my learned hesitation around point-and-click games, a genre that contains mechanical highs and lows that PT admittedly rides into here and there, but also one that never degrades by having a guide on hand. That's not even to mention how PT's narrative boosts the experience tenfold past the trappings of pointing and/or clicking. There are moments here that, while mundane, are written so well that I'm going to be carrying them with me for a long time onwards.

It's rare that the theme of adolescence is shown through a mature lense without falling into some kind of irreverence or flippancy. Perfect Tides manages to achieve that. The game's story and characters come across as deeply genuine and complex without compromising on humour and levity. It is a coming-of-age story which treats the perspective of the main character with an almost unprescedented amount of respect, all throughout remaining very careful not to anchor itself in hindsight and condescension. The writing is so beautifully direct in its emotion and in how it conveys the internality of the main character that it is impossible not to fully immerse yourself in and empathise with her. Every concern that may feel benign to an adult is here treated with the insurmountable scale of a 16-year-old's life in mind, and you can feel every overwhelming detail of it. Every hope and fear, every blush, every ill-fated belief, every smile and tremor manage to seem grand and important when it would have been so easy to belittle that emotional reality, even unconsciously. This story, as all good ones, makes familiar things become alien again, small things become huge, and huge things become sublime. Perfect Tides is a game written with an incredible level of care and sensitivity. I could recommend it to almost anyone. I am a bit frustrated by the fact that it's so easy to accidentally skip dialogue, and no way to go back to it without reloading a save. :/