Meredith Gran video interview – Perfect Tides: Station to Station

• Interviews by Laura Cress
• Published:

Comic book artist and game developer Meredith Gran never intended to create a sequel to Perfect Tides, her 2022 point-and-click adventure game that follows a year in the life of Mara, an internet-obsessed teenager growing up in the early '00s. But, as she told me when we sat down to have a chat upon the release of the new demo for that very sequel, Perfect Tides: Station to Station, when the first game was released and the recognition came from fans that this was something special, it was too difficult to let Mara's world go completely.

“That was the first time I realised the sort of feedback a person gets when they complete a video game,” Meredith explains. “Which was, coming from comics, something I had never experienced before... When people play a video game they are interfacing so directly with your own thoughts. A sort of madness took over me that week and I immediately began writing the second game and I just had to do more of this. That was almost two years ago and all of the ideas that I wrote in that period of madness, those few days, are still the story of this game.”

Station to Station will once again follow Mara, but this time it’s 2003, she’s a little older (well, 18), and has now left her island life of the first game, living as a freshman in college on the mainland. As Meredith says, “She’s just become free… She's free to leave home, and go off into the city and crash at her friend’s house and explore all these ideas in school, but it’s the first time she’s doing that – there’s no manual for these things so she’s learning how to conduct herself in social situations she’s never been in before.”

One way this will crop up in the actual mechanics of Station to Station is through the introduction of “topics,” which Mara will collect as she interacts with people. You’ll still be picking up the odd item to put in your inventory here and there, but the main thing you’ll be collecting as you make your way through young adulthood is knowledge. Stored in your suitably '00s-looking phone, these topics (for example “movies,” “the city,” “drugs,” etc.) can be used on most of the characters you meet, although not everyone will be interested in talking about all of them and certain topics might be more suited to certain people.

Develop your topics and you’ll see your “score” increase, which will not only improve Mara’s understanding of the world, but also her skills as a writer. Meredith explains that “You’ll get assignments – not just school ones but other things that you might need to use your writing brain to write. Mara will navigate many aspects of her life through this writing mechanic. That gives me lots of opportunities to allow the player to make choices that have more dimensions than just multiple choice ‘what do I say’ kind of thing.”

An example of this in the demo is when you have to finish your school assignment about “The City In Media.” You can use any of the topics you’ve discovered from your chats with people as your primary and secondary sources of inspiration for the assignment (even ones that don’t make much sense under that title). If none of the topics have been developed, you’re not going to grow quite as much as a writer as if they were bursting with points – much like how in real life a piece of writing becomes more developed the more the author researches what they're writing about.

All this level of detail in choice and interaction does mean that it’s very unlikely we’ll see a release for Station to Station in 2024. “That’s why I wanted this demo to come out,” says Meredith. “I wanted to give people a little taste, and remind them that I'm working every day on this game. It’s coming along very well… We’re looking at at least a year, perhaps a bit more. But 2025 is definitely my goal.” Given the fact that it looks like Perfect Tides: Station to Station might be almost twice the length of its original, with roughly 16 days in Mara’s life across a year full of angst, awkwardness and joy to explore, I’ll allow the slightly longer wait, and as suggested, get a taste of the many choices that await us in the new demo.  

Find out more about Perfect Tides: Station to Station in the full interview here:

To watch more of Cressup’s video interviews, playthroughs and more streamed live, be sure to follow her Twitch channel.

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