Adventure Gamers - Forums

Out today.

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.

Featuring:

-Classic 90s-style Point and Click user interface: collect inventory, interact with people and objects, and explore your island home.
-Rich narrative and character-driven story: solve puzzles and watch the plot unfold.
-Move through 45+ beautifully designed rooms, day and night, in 4 seasons of the year.

Been looking forward to this one, it’s developed by one of my favorite comic authors, Meredith Gran. I haven’t gotten to far yet, but straightaway I’m impressed with the writing. It’s funny and personal in a very believable way. The game is more open than I would have anticipated as well, there’s a big island area to explore right away. The environment art is really good.

Looking forward to playing more later today. If you like this sort of coming-of-age story and can relate to the main character, It feels like a recommend already.

The introduction video is really promising. 

I’m finishing up another game so I haven’t fully dived into Perfect Tides yet, but I’m getting to it very soon. Loved the ~hour or so I played of it.

If any of you were a teenager who spent a lot of time online in the year 2000 then I encourage you to check out this game. It’s made in AGS, but there’s some really great animation.

Since it’s made by a webcomic writer the art and writing is really strong. I really appreciate the believable dialogue. The game is a bit open-ended and doesn’t have hot spots so it can be a little confusing what you have to do at times. There is a narrator like in old Sierra games, but no deaths or dead ends that I could see though I think there are optional stuff you can miss.

I’m a little over half way done and looking forward to seeing the ending. I definitely recommend checking it out.

Played through the game and it’s fantastic. Perfect Tides manages to capture a time and place so believably that it almost feels as if you’d really lived there. The level of detail, and the choices of which details were highlighted, is impeccable. It’s so believably rendered that I have no doubt you’ll be reliving your own moments when ostensibly harmless words made you feel slighted, when you lied about yourself to look cool, when you couldn’t bring yourself to say how you really felt, every fight with a family member, or regrettable outburst—all the small moments of that awkward middle period between childhood and adulthood that you usually (and mercifully) don’t recall, viscerally reemerging in waves of nostalgia thanks to the believability and human quality of the writing.

Perfect Tides is a “warts and all” coming of age story you rarely see, especially in popular media. Mara isn’t the kind of awkward you’d get in a Hollywood movie or popular streaming series, AKA “quirky.” Mara is an absolute neurotic mess, the real deal. In truth, she’s so anxiety ridden that playing as her could almost be TOO dour, were it not for the fact that the writing in Perfect Tides is as capable at drawing comedy from it’s scenario as drama. I belly laughed almost as much as I teared up playing this game.

Gameplay wise it’s not especially challenging. The game is open-ended but its design is not akin to a Ron Gilbert style puzzle box. The tasks you necessarily must complete to finish the game are pretty simple. But there’s a lot of optional interactions, many of which you’d likely miss the first time around, that effect how certain scenes play out and if you get the best ending. So while finishing the game is fairly simple, doing everything you can is a more of a challenge.

The biggest drawback to its design is that early on there’s moments that are too lacking in direction. As the game progresses it gets better at laying out an explicit goal, though. So even if you’re wandering around the island a bit, you at least know what you’re working toward.

I’m really happy with how the game turned out, an early contender for one of my favorites this year. It’s a testament to the kind of personal, small stakes, stories adventure games can tell. And that’s not even getting into how great the art and animation can be.

IDK if Meredith Gran and the Three Bees team have any plans to make other games in the future, but I hope they do because this was great.

Now that I’ve also finished it, I agree with basically all the points of PlanetX. It’s definitely a quality release.

John Walker’s review of Perfect Tides for Buried Treasure:

It’s tempting when playing a game like Perfect Tides to want to patronise that era of our lives, and in turn, Mara’s fictional depiction of that time. I’m fortunate that my own teenage years almost aligned with those shown here. I’m a few years older, but I was there a few years before, Compuserve instead of Mara’s AOL, exploring those deeply confusing and nebulously romantic online relationships. While at the same time, constantly believing that with each new start, with each change, I could reinvent my personality to become someone I could believe others would want to like, and yet always turning up as myself.

And oh my goodness, I haven’t even talked about the wonderful art, the animations, the jokes, the dozens of characters. How there are whole sub-plots you can completely miss or piece together. How I now have to replay the entire game again to make sure that final scene can play out just one tiny bit differently, because I feel like I owe it to Mara and her mother…

I wept for Mara here. The precision with which creator Meredith Gran recreates that time, both the millennial world and the coming-of-age within it, is astonishing. It’s an incredible feat of storytelling, of recalling the deep truth of being 15-turning-16, without ever patronising. Of clinging to the security of childhood, yet desperately fighting to escape into the possibility of adulthood. It’s also lovely, very funny, beautifully written, and let’s not forget, a really decent point-and-click adventure. This is breathtakingly good.

There’s a lot more in the full review, including a personal anecdote that speaks to the kind of memories Perfect Tides draws forth in the mind.

I know a few people who have been following John Walker’s adventure game reviews for quite some time now. So I’m happy he chose to highlight PT with such with such a glowing review.

A sequel to Perfect Tides called Perfect Tides: Station to Station has just been announced by Meredith Gran & Three Bees. This time we’ll be playing as 18 year old Mara who’s moved to a city as an aspiring writer.

Like the first game, the sequel is being crowdfunded and the Kickstarter campaign is currently underway.

I thought I’d give this game a go & so far I love the artwork. The trouble is I’m not sure what the premise of the story is (or have I missed something?)
So far I like the characters, the dialogue is interesting but I’d like to like the game more - it’s interesting enough to keep going for a little longer but I’m feeling a lack of story to grab me enough to keep going if it doesn’t pick up!