Perfect Tides is a point and click adventure game about the agony and anticipation of being a teen. Set in the year 2000, you play as Mara, an internet-obsessed young writer who lives on a so-called island paradise. Following 4 seasons of the year, you experience through Mara the beauty and silence of the island, the turmoil of family life and mainland public school, and an ever-evolving quest for love, friendship and experience.
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Meredith Gran is simply amazing at capturing those small moments of humanity and twisting them in a way that just touches your soul. Perfect Tides is about a teenage girl growing up on Fire Island but I saw so much of myself in the story, like I felt that this was me.
The writing and art are like six stars but unfortunately some of the puzzles involved are kinda obtuse.
The writing and art are like six stars but unfortunately some of the puzzles involved are kinda obtuse.
The writing in this was so fantastic and evocative it somehow made me miss being a moody, awkward teenager. So many memories and feelings from that stage of my life that I thought were long-forgotten came back to me playing this game. The issues with this were purely with the gameplay. The story worked well in a click-and-point game format, but a lot of actions the game required you to take to move the story forward felt completely obtuse. I had to look at a guide a few times and would have never worked out I needed to do certain things without it. Interacting with the world was also difficult - objects seemed to have very small boundaries and I had to do a lot of pixel-hunting to find the exact spot to click that would let me actually interact with an object.
Overall a fantastic, immersive story with messy but relatable characters. Some janky gameplay but the story is worth it.
Overall a fantastic, immersive story with messy but relatable characters. Some janky gameplay but the story is worth it.
This review contains spoilers
I really liked the writing in this, and the pixel animation was cute and expressive. I was a little let down by it towards the end because what I suspect was a bug kept me from developing the photo properly for my mom. I was so invested I downloaded a hex editor to try to edit my save file to fix it! It didn't work, and then the game basically yelled at me for not completing that task. That didn't feel great. I liked it overall well enough, though I wish the game didn't feel so beholden to point and click adventure trappings, a lot of times i didn't know what to do because I had clicked on the obvious stuff but it turned out i was like a pixel off or whatever. Excited to see what the sequel is like!