Review for Perfect Tides
There is a subset of small settlements in rural America that take their names from the local conditions: Catfish Paradise, Dry Prong, and Happy Corner (seriously) to name just a few. Perfect Tides is another of these places, albeit fictional. It’s a lovely island town that’s warm and touristy in the summer months but cold and lonely in the off-season. We find ourselves there at the beginning of the year 2000: the internet is making its mark on the world, the Y2K bug was not a big deal after all, and people are realizing that - now the fireworks have finished - the new millennium may have started with a whimper.
You play as a local unwilling island-resident, 15-year-old Mara Whitefish. Mara, having lost her father a few years before, lives with her overprotective mother and overbearing older brother. She spends a lot of her time in her room writing on bulletin boards, grabbing every opportunity she can, weather permitting, to escape to the mainland by ferry to hang out with anyone who’ll look past her adolescent insecurities. Like the world, delicately poised between the fun-lovin’ 90s and the serious future of the '00s, Mara herself is delicately poised between her childhood and adulthood. She’ll need your help to point-and-click her way through the difficult decisions that lie ahead in the complicated upcoming year.
Writer, artist and developer Meredith Gran has created in Mara Whitefish an appealingly awkward but mercurial character. Mara’s story as it unfolds throughout the game will be somewhat familiar to most people: from boring homework assignments to deciding whether or not to accept that first cigarette, we’ve probably all been there. What gives Mara’s story its unique slant is the wonderfully funny yet compassionate prose that Meredith Gran seems to pull from each situation.
The greater part of the process of playing Perfect Tides does involve reading your opinions and memories. There’s a lot of comedy to enjoy; talking about your bedroom, you’re told: “You’ve trained Mom to knock. She opens the door immediately after knocking, but ... baby steps.” There are also more confrontational subjects. Take for example the island’s woodland path location: Mara won’t enter the path until she has someone else with her - not because of a fear of being accosted by an unknown attacker, but because of her uncertainty as to the current whereabouts of Hitler: “Of course, by now the Führer would be over 100 years old ... but even the frailest hand can fire a pistol” she quips, before admitting that this apprehension is mainly based on burgeoning internet conspiracy theories. Meredith Gran confronts even the darkest subjects, sometimes with comedy, sometimes more directly.
The text is written from the second-person point of view, and your connection to Mara can almost get a little too close for comfort, being told for example that you still live in “the house of your father. The shadow of a dream ...” These moments of intense emotion can really hit home. Just occasionally, Gran’s text goes a little too far into whimsy, particularly with regards to Mara’s somewhat confusing relationship with her de facto boyfriend, the punkish Jason. It’s not always easy to work out what they think about one another. Along with the motivations of other non-player characters, Mara’s reactions occasionally prove a little frustrating, and you just have to go with it of course.
The puzzles very much serve the developing story, rather than the other way around. Many seem to solve themselves simply by speaking with the right person or logging on to your online chat room at the right time. They often involve small tasks that Mara sets herself, such as finding soil to grow plants for a local competition or learning the steps to develop a photograph in the school darkroom. My favorite involved finding a way into Mara’s brother’s bedroom to reconnect to the internet after you are banned. Warning: if he catches you in the act, you are toast! None of the puzzles could be considered difficult, although once or twice I found myself wandering around the island unsure as to how to activate the next step in the story.
Background artist Soren Hughes’ graphics are another big part of the atmosphere of Perfect Tides. Their use of colour ranges from very good to excellent, and the same scene rendered differently in spring and winter effectively shows the passing seasons. Some of the locations reminded me very much of scenes from indie films, with young people just ... hanging around. At times I almost forgot I was playing a game and not watching a film. The scenes in Mara’s friend Simon’s modernist beach house, and from the side of the ferry as it races across the water to the mainland, were particularly strong. This is somewhat countered by the overall slightly messy presentation and (sometimes) sloppy character drawing. The icons are unattractive and the low resolution of the artwork and animation will either appeal to your South Park sensibilities or make you wonder what they were thinking. Personally, I found the visuals to be wonderfully charming and fitting to the zeitgeist.
It’s a similar tale with Daniel Kobylarz’s music. Although sometimes a little twee, it fits the atmosphere very well and I was still humming a couple of the tunes several weeks after finishing the game. Imagine listening to your friend messing around on a cheap Casio keyboard in their bedroom in the early 90s (if you can imagine that) but they’re surprisingly good at it. The tunes are often location-specific, so eventually, the trying-to-be-upbeat music of your home, or the slightly dismal and tinny music of the island’s main drag, becomes very familiar.
Perfect Tides is a fairly long game, stretching over four seasons from New Year's Day to the Whitefish family Hanukkah celebrations. This forms a suitably family-oriented closing point to proceedings, as by the end you feel as if you have been through some heavy stuff with your mum and brother. There can be a sense of time dragging, as it might for a bored teen: wandering around looking for things to do and people to meet and spending countless hours on your computer. This can be endearing, but at times it can become a little tedious.
For the most part, though, Perfect Tides manages to captivate with its sharp humour, superb dialogues, and a keen whiff of nostalgia for the early '00s running throughout. At times you’ll also feel the emotional punch of teenage rejection, which can hurt, so be warned.
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