Perfect Tides: Station to Station

I read a great Kotaku review of this game and had to try it, because just the mere descriptions brought me back to my own undergrad experience at NYU in 2003. While watching playthroughs on YouTube (this is how I try before I buy), the situations felt so familiar to me, specifically, and made me immediately Google who made this game to see if they too went to NYU in 2003. Turns out, Meredith Gran (the game's chief creator) went to SVA around that time, but still, I think we had the same college experience.

You play as Mara Whitefish, an 18-19-year-old college freshman at a fictional university with not much of a campus, but the entire city at your disposal. Sometimes she commutes home on Long Island, sometimes she crashes with friends, but she always finds herself in awkward situations and doing young, dumb things. The gameplay and puzzles reflect the feeling of those hazy, crazy youthful days (there is one main puzzle that is especially challenging, but the situation it lends itself to would also be challenging in real life; the relief when you solve it is unreal).

Mara falls in love, has crushes, is overdramatic, ignores her school work, can only read one book a day, chats aimlessly on AIM, smokes weed, drinks too much booze, doesn't know how to articulate everything she feels when she knows something is wrong, has anxious thoughts and insecurities, and is the epitome of a teenage girl on the cusp of her 20s. Everything you do and read will impact whether you are a good writer. My Mara was a terrible writer who mostly chased boys and made questionable decisions (I cannot comment if that reflects who I was in 2003), but the writing in the game overall is excellent and the ending is very sweet and profound.

Also, as a professor now, I related to the professor stuff a lot and I really worried about Mara around some of the storylines where she interacts with older male writers. Unfortunately, encountering, uh, older men with questionable motives is also a sadly accurate part of being a young female college student filled with wonder in the Big City. I wished I could protect her.

Highly recommend. A ton of cozy, funny gameplay for $20.