Perfect Tides: Station to Station review: a powerful ode to 2003

Perfect Tides: Station to Station is a love letter to millennial cringe

It was a different time — of course it was. Everyone you knew could fit in an AOL friend list. Your second home was in ramshackle message boards with the 12 other strangers who loved Death Cab for Cutie before it was cool. You couldn’t possibly know that there were tens of thousands more people like you out there. The world still felt small; loving something still felt intimate.

Meredith Gran hasn’t forgotten that feeling. Her latest game, Perfect Tides: Station to Station, isn’t just set in the early 2000s for the sake of millennial nostalgia. It still loves like it’s 2003. A familiar college coming-of-age story puts its ear to a human heart that used to beat a little differently before the age of mass communication. It’s a return to a time when an indie rock record and a late-night AIM conversation with a crush were one and the same: precious sounds that belonged only to you.

Station to Station is a follow up to 2022’s Perfect Tides, a point-and-click adventure game by Gran’s solo game studio, Three Bees. That game chronicled the life of Mara Whitefish, an aspiring writer navigating a key year of her teens on a small island circa 2000. It was an honest and endearing story about growing up in a small place and yearning for a larger pond to swim in. Station to Station grants her wish. Three years after that game, Mara is now a college student at a university in an ever-so-slightly fictionalized version of Manhattan. She’s no longer surrounded by empty beaches and the same few local businesses she’s always known. High rise apartments now tower above her and taxi cabs roam free like wild horses. Finally, she is free.

Well, mostly — she’s still held back by a demanding high-school sweetheart that keeps her tethered to the past via cellphone charger.

Gran doesn’t shift too far away from Perfect Tides’ point-and-click structure to tell the next chapter of Mara’s story, even though the ‘90s PC game aesthetic of the original game is out of step with a 2003 period piece. You still navigate by clicking around a city that feels more limited than Mara’s hometown was in her last adventure. There’s some sparse item management, but there’s not much to interact with. Even in a classic New York tale of a small town kid finally hitting the big time, Mara’s life still has its constraints.

Gran understands that the world is rarely as big as it feels when you’re young. Mara isn’t suddenly living in a cavernous loft and rubbing shoulders with the city’s elite. She’s crashing on a friend's couch in a dingy railroad apartment as a cardboard Ballistic: Ecks vs Sever standee watches over her. The bulk of the game takes place on one single city block, where Mara bounces between her school’s library, a local movie theater, and an eastern European restaurant that looks a lot like Veselka (a real East Village staple for NYC college students on a tight budget). Her celebrity encounters aren’t with A-list actors, but tastemaking bloggers who are free to walk out in public unrecognized until Mara comes along. They feel like stars to her, but they’re still holding reading salons in tiny bookshops for five attendees.

Those contrasts define Mara’s journey into adulthood. Her story is one of mounting angst as she’s stuck feeling at once too small and too big for a life she once dreamed of. She’s a plant freshly repotted into a new home: The fresh soil feels expansive to her small roots, but she grows rapidly over the course of the game’s one-year timeline. Mara struggles to figure out who she wants to be during that time, taking in new experiences and jumping between relationships that keep broadening her horizons. It’s a lot of information to soak up at once.

Station to Station’s most clever twist plays with its hero’s sponge-like state: Mara now has a list of mental stats like sex, music, and anarchism. She can deepen her understanding on those topics — using them to complete essays for her college classes — by reading books, going to the movies in her free time, and through formative conversations. It’s the familiar experience of hearing an album that, like, totally changes your life, reimagined as a lite RPG gag.

That’s fitting considering all of this unfolds during the early 2000s, a foundational few years for millennials. In the moment, that era was the peak of cool. Entire personalities were forged in pop culture. Youths protested to the jangling guitars of New York City’s rock revival, led by bands like Interpol and The Strokes. The Matrix wasn’t an action flick; it was a philosophical awakening. Every piece of art you connected with became a rung in your DNA. Mara is a familiar kind of 2003 know-it-all, occasionally spinning off into detailed asides about movies that no doubt are a regurgitation of something she read on a trendy blog. (Station to Station reclaims Mara’s identity just one year before films like Garden State would mistake her earnest enthusiasm for fashionable quirkiness.)

That experience isn’t specific to millennials — every generation has its fainting Beatles fans and screaming Swifties — but 2003 existed in a unique stasis between the early internet and social media eras. Myspace had yet to rise and transform the way we absorbed information at scale. A computer screen was still only a window into a wider world that you could catch new glimpses of with persistent browsing, a digital extension of perusing Blockbuster or digging through crates at the CD shop. We’re brought back to that lost time any time Mara turns on a bulky PC to write an essay and is greeted by a rudimentary search engine that can barely dig up anything new about the topics swirling around in her head.

When you discovered something special online, it felt like you’d found a secret that only belonged to you. (Part of the success of once-dominant blogs like Pitchfork was their ability to establish themselves as the destination for coolness as a new hunger for it arose.) There was a sense of intimacy to “underground” art that’s become harder to hang onto as our digital windows have grown larger. Maybe that’s why hoodie-wearing hipsters earned themselves such a reputation for being territorial gatekeepers in the 2000s; losing a small band to a major label and arena tours felt like losing a part of your own soul. You can feel that passion in Mara, and not just in the way she waxes poetic about music and movies. Each new kiss feels like spinning The Exploding Hearts’ Guitar Romantic for the first time.

If it all sounds painfully nostalgic, it is. Station to Station is full of catnip for aging hipsters, loaded with winking references to the indie culture of the time. It’s a proud ode to millennial cringe in all its saccharine sincerity. Like a teen processing Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, its attempts to wring something profound out of a standard coming-of-age experience can come off as eye-rollingly obvious in its sappiest monologues. Mara isn’t quite sure who she’s going to become yet? Take a number and get in line!

But Gran reaches beyond the namedrops to pull something universal back from 2003. Maybe we loved a little differently back then, but doesn’t a heart still break the same way now?

Station to Station’s most powerful moment is the one that’s suspended in time. Mara is back home visiting her mother, who has settled into a modest apartment off the mainland. Her grandmother, whose age has begun to show in her intermittent falls and memory loss, sits in quiet shame in the living room as she worries that she’s become a burden. Mara wants to lighten the mood, so she digs one of her grandmother’s sheet music books out of a piano bench. There’s a note scribbled on one page, connecting an old piece of music to a fading memory. Mara punches out the tune on a rickety upright piano and, suddenly, her grandmother perks up. The cultural chasm between women from different generations closes for a moment. They’re both hearing the same sound: love.

I close my eyes and imagine the same thing happening for Mara eventually, perhaps in a distant Perfect Tides installment. Maybe one day, she’ll be brought back into the world by her granddaughter hitting the unmistakable chords that open Death Cab for Cutie’s yearning “Transatlanticism.” It won’t matter if it’s a cringe ballad from some forgotten indie crooner. Each chord will ring out on a steady tempo, pumping blood back into Mara’s heart. An evening sunset shared with a short-term lover will flash into a mind that was once occupied by anarchist theory and film history. For a moment, she’ll be the same age as her granddaughter. A song can bring it all back.

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Perfect Tides: Station to Station will be released Jan. 22 on Windows PC. The game was reviewed on Steam Deck using a prerelease download code provided by Three Bees. You can find additional information about Polygon’s ethics policy here.