Octopus Pie creator Meredith Gran embodies teenage vibes in Perfect Tides

If you asked me to describe it Perfect Tides in a word, I would call it honest. Give me two words and I’d attach an adverb of appropriate weight: stunningly honest.

The pixelated point and click adventure game developed by online comics writer Meredith Gran squid cake, and its studio, Three Bees, sometimes shocked me with where it wanted to go and what it was willing to do. Used during Gran squid cake to explore her 20s Perfect Tides examines the life of a teenager in the early 2000s. Though I’ve never lived on a remote island that was empty for three seasons where I had to take the ferry to school, I know this era: dial-up modems, AOL instant messaging, and intimate online communities. There is consolation Perfect Tidesbut there is also terror.

I recognize the sheer terror and stupidity of being a young girl – kinda weird, too – and the emotions that come with it. Fighting with siblings over screen time, wanting to be kissed or not, and being petty towards your parents. Perfect Tides projects an honest portrayal of all kinds of pain, the kind of pain I don’t even want to admit to myself. There is one particular scene that stands out: Mara, the main character, is standing on a dock with some new friends. She’s with all these people and yet she feels alone, like she’s speaking a different language. She admits to herself something that startled me with its intensity: “You dreamed of a tragedy in your life that would endear you to others. You dreamed of having an excuse, a justification for how you are in people’s minds.”

Perfect Tides alternates between those dark, complex feelings and the goofy, sometimes funny teenage dramas in the six to seven hours it took me to play through the game.

“I really wanted to talk about loneliness, a kind of hopeless feeling, like there’s too much of a gap between where you are and where you would like to be,” Gran told Polygon. “There are many films and TV shows about children that are only a few degrees away from popularity – it just takes an event to happen, there is something special about them that just needs to be unlocked. I didn’t want to do it that way.”

Gran wanted players to live in this lonely place. Of course there are temporary escapes: for Mara and I, it was our online worlds and communities, the spaces where everything felt just as real as the outside world, even when others said it shouldn’t. But there’s no escaping teenage years and the confusion, joy, and terror that come with them. It will change, but it’s hard to say when. “You will live in the intense anticipation of these changes.”

Perfect TidesThe gameplay feels like an interpretation of this idea. No real end goal is communicated to the player. In one case, I started with a simple task: bring the groceries home. Once I figured that out – after struggling a bit to understand the mechanics – I was left with few clues as to where to go or what to do next. Perfect Tides feels aimless in a way that forces a narrative of wandering, but not in a way that pulls me out of the game. And so I move from place to place and click around. When you use a scroll wheel, the cursor changes: there’s an eye for looking at things, a hand for touching things, and a little human icon for walking around. Items can be pulled from a backpack and also used to interact with the world. The story stems from explorations weaving through the island and through Mara’s online life.

Gran said she thought about it in the past when she was doing comics. This art form helped her to take into account the experience of the user and play with the form to control perspective as much as possible. This idea was translated into a game; Perfect Tides is her first. The big difference is that she is able to watch people experience it Perfect Tides in a way that’s not really possible with comics. “The comic version would have to be like this: I stand over you as you read the book out loud and react to things,” Gran said. “It would be impossible to ever get that.” This experience was different because of the Twitch streamers: they are there to perform while experiencing the game. “I feel like a freak looking at stuff like that,” Gran laughed.

“Occasionally, the streamers are so disarmed by something that they react in a way that almost seems like there’s no audience there,” Gran said. “Most of the time, streamers remember things about themselves and start being open about those things to relate – very intimate, shameful, or horrible things that come to mind. […] It often feels like a group therapy session. I never expected anything like that.”

Gran will continue to make comics, but she said games will likely be her medium “for the foreseeable future.”

“It made me realize that people can go deep with games,” Gran said. “You can interact with another human in a way that — I’ve never had that kind of connection with humans before.”