Perfect Tides: Station to Station review: Figuring it out

Perfect Tides' sequel is a sincere look back at the "college experience."

A lot of games that look back in time share a tone that’s somewhere between nostalgic and bittersweet. Few of them are as dry, honest, and regretful as Perfect Tides: Station to Station. Part point-and-click adventure, part autobiography, this sequel sees aspiring writer and college freshman Mara Whitefish escape her small town and start college in “The City,” a simple but inconvenient train ride away from home. Her experiences as a young adult in 2003 are relatable enough as a millennial myself, but more important than the references to The Matrix sequels are the moments in which the bad thoughts take the reins, the social pressures intersect with the anxieties, and the long-standing relationships from before strain and break against the new. That stuff probably hits regardless of which generation Wikipedia says you’re a part of.

Point-and-click depression

As an adventure game, Station to Station keeps things pretty simple. You can walk around and look at things or talk to people, and what you can interact with is limited enough that it feels like there isn’t much “filler.” There aren’t really puzzles, but what you do have instead are a pair of systems that represent Mara’s inner development and school life. Each day you can read one book and write one paper. Books (and other events) become formative experiences, and develop “Topics” in Mara’s mind. Those topics become tools you can use for papers, for which you designate a primary and secondary topic. You also have a cell phone that stores topics and people you meet, which you can plug in as prompts when you’re talking with people out in the city.

Freedom is a key theme in Station to Station, as Mara is learning first hand that going to college both opens up new freedoms and introduces new guardrails that restrict life in new ways compared to childhood. It’s complicated stuff, and some of these gameplay elements help push that concept into your mind. On one hand you’re having all these formative, new experiences that make you feel like your mind is expanding in real time. You’re reading new books, watching new movies, going to parties, talking more openly in class than you ever did in school before. But at the same time, your time is less yours than ever, you’re constantly staring down deadlines and juggling tasks, and the margin of error is shrinking and a proportionate rate to how many more kinds of new mistakes you can make. It’s a lot, and Mara’s struggle to cope is communicated to you through these simple systems quite effectively.

Those systems work out just fine on the Nintendo Switch, the new version of Station to Station that this review is based on. You use the right stick to control the cursor like a mouse, and the face buttons serve different functions like speaking versus asking, trading books, or answering the phone. There’s also a dedicated button for “look,” which is poorly communicated but easy enough to accidentally trip over. It’s a spartan port, but one that functions perfectly fine and doesn’t seem to come with any weird performance or technical problems. Clicking through the phone and other menus can be a bit fumbly, though.

Speaking of fumbly, at the risk of spoilers, there's another "mechanic" here that is more or less a boss fight. It's properly stressful and intense, and introduces a health bar and fail state when these elements don't persis otherwise. This stuff is effective, but you can't save during it, and unless you know it's coming you might have to rely on autosave to continue if you lose. And autosaving isn't super aggressive, so it can be kind of annoying to lose, then reorient yourself as you reload your save to try again and do some stuff over. It's a side effect of trying something to punch up an otherwise simple game, but annoying nonetheless.

Life, liberty, and barely affording cheap pizza

Mara’s homework is only one of her many problems, of course, and Station to Station doesn’t shy away from rawness when it comes to drinking, sex, toxic relationships, eroding friendships, trauma colliding in weird ways with perception and memory, and the uncertainty of it all when you add trying to figure out what being a creative person means in the context of education and work on top. I have certainly been in some permutations of the situations I see unfold in this game before, and my reactions shifted between the catharsis of being seen and the horrors of reliving things I wish I could leave behind forever. For extra millennial flavor, there’s even ruminations on things like the social climate immediately following 9/11, the internet as a growing, chaotic social space, and bewilderment over stupid movies like Anger Management starring Adam Sandler being box office successes.

 Writing about writing about yourself

In a lot of ways, you can really tell this story is autobiographical. There’s something about telling your own story that defies traditional narrative structure a bit, and provides an extra sense of realness in exchange. Sometimes it can be hard to nail down things like tone and themes in the usual sense, but that’s because you’re looking at a chapter of a real human life, albeit an obviously fictionalized modification thereof. In real life, things just happen every day, and they don’t all contribute to the plot in clean ways, like puzzle pieces magically falling from the sky and sliding into place. It’s more like the pieces are scattered all over the table and each one weighs like 20 pounds, so picking them up in the moment is hard enough, much less understanding where it goes and being able to place it easily. Station to Station reflects that lack of focus just as much as it does have a story to ultimately tell, which is a strength lending to its verisimilitude.

Crucially, as a writer in the aughts just starting college, just moving to a big city where so many other visible creator types seem to have it all figured out, Mara struggles with why she hasn’t. Again, it’s all a whirlwind of obligations, new freedoms, new restrictions, unclear goals and aims, new experiences, social dynamics, responsibility, yadda yadda. There’s a lack of clarity to the “path” of being a writer that makes going to school for it kind of weird in a way that’s hard to explain. Because, you know, it’s a thing you can just do. It’s not like being a doctor, for which you go to medical school, learn how to do it, then go work in a hospital. There’s no generic work box for writers to go clock into every day. You just kind of occupy the spaces you already do, meet people, find opportunities through networking and circumstance, and work on your craft in the meantime. But you also have to eat, somehow. It’s no wonder so many of us are nervous wrecks. Being a student while you’re also learning how the entire rest of everything else works at the same time? Yikes.

Perfect Tides: Station to Station is more somber than wistful, more grounded than nostalgic, and more realistic than fanciful. The 2003 setting feels circumstantial rather than deliberate as a storytelling device, and the autobiographical piece of it bleeds from every word of text. It’s not entirely a downer and has plenty of humor, personality, and hopefulness. But it’s not trying to make you feel good about looking back at the past and being a fun game. This is a story about what it’s like to be on your own for the first time, and everything that comes with that. The unforeseen complications, the relationships, the learning. You’ll be reminded of the things you regret in your own life just as much, if not more than, the things you look back on fondly. You might laugh, you might cringe a little, both on behalf of Mara and yourself. Above all, it’s a good reminder that you’ve always struggled, and you’re still here to reflect. And that’s pretty cool.

Perfect Tides: Station to Station is available on May 14, 2026 for the Nintendo Switch, and now for the PC. A Switch code was provided by the publisher for this review.

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Review for
Perfect Tides: Station to Station
8
Pros

• Excellent autobiographical writing about being a sad young person in college
• Fun point-and-click systems that reflect what the story's about
• Controls work well on Nintendo Switch

Cons

• Might make you think about things from your youth you'd prefer not to revisit
• Boss fight thing is interesting but introduces an annoying game over risk