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| Reminds me of doing my wife's hair... |
After 11,5 hours, I reached the ending of
Perfect Tides: Station to Station!
And what a ride it was. I'm very curious myself where I will rank this game in my top ten of 2026... There are hardly any puzzles, you just experience the story, make some choices in dialogue replies, and there's this "academic management" gameplay to it as well, in whether or not to read or write, and what exactly. If anything, this game actually makes me want to write stories again myself! Which has been years for me... There's this passion in Mara that's quite contagious.
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| Took me forever to find the second page... |
Mara is a difficult character to figure out, though, because she's in constant turmoil. This makes the game very different from other adventure games, where the main character usually is some caricature, or very superficial, with only a bare personality, serving more as an avatar for the player. Not so with Mara, who is very much her own person, and so you never really play as yourself, you play as Mara. If you can actually call it playing, since you're more following her story than actually doing anything.
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| Ah, family... |
Am I happy with how the story went? Often I wished I could make different choices, but some things just seemed bound to happen no matter what. Often I felt like I could only choose the lesser of two evils. But it's a good story, a very layered story, but you need to be open to it. It's very much a young adult game, with themes that occupy those young people's minds who are in college or university and struggling with their identity and relationships.
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| Just chillin'... |
The only thing that truly bothered me, was the constant smoking. Actually refusing to smoke was a choice I sorely missed in this game... Otherwise, I quite enjoyed this story, since I often also still enjoy reading the occasional young adult novel, and I'm certainly happy I played this game.
You can find Perfect Tides: Station to Station on Steam and on itch.
Next up, my wife FINALLY asked to play a game together again - we haven't done that since we gave up on Blue Prince (after 100 hours and 65 in-game days) - so we're going for a choices-based interactive thriller/drama with some QTE's thrown in about a burglary gone wrong...
