Perfect Tides, the precursor to this game, displays a competence in applying the basic mechanics of Adventure games in highly effective ways to tell an intimate story. Pretty much everything in each scene can be Looked At to get some excellent writing that tells you more about the story's setting, its characters, the protagonist's current mood. The game does not block you on many puzzles, but [i]does[/i] include a bunch of things you can do that are not strictly necessary - some impact the story, others don't, and it's usually hard to tell so you end up choosing what to do based on the fiction.
Perfect Tides: Station to Station takes this already great setup and makes it feel sparse in comparison. It does a thing I love seeing in games: invents mechanics in service of the story, rather than the other way around. You're playing as a college student, so of course you have writing assignments with deadlines that you need to meet and often have to choose between writing versus all the other things you could be doing in the game. You can loan out and trade books throughout the game, but you can only read one book per day. Reading books can increase your knowledge of a handful of topics, which you can then use to write better assignments. A game loop! But it's all there in service of the story. You will never (I think?) lose the game because you failed an assignment. You might get a "worse" ending, but I'd say that sort of thinking doesn't really fit into games like this, where endings can't really be categorized as "good" or "bad". Really, reading books is fun because you get a summary of what Mara, the protagonist, thought about these games. It's interesting stuff and really pulls you into the character's frame of mind throughout. And there's hidden nuance in these mechanics, too! As a quick spoiler: [spoiler]if you read The Wretched of the Earth before The Communist Manifesto, you fail to understand it and are unfamiliar with its language. Read it in the opposite direction and you get a lot out of it.[/spoiler] Nothing "feels" mechanical about these, despite how mechanical they actually are.
The story itself is messy and dense - structured into days, I had to take a break between each in-game day just to process the various happenings. Mara is a complex character with a lot of conflicting feelings and thoughts. Nothing is held back, and again, the Adventure game trappings are used excellently towards that, showing Mara's inner workings in a bunch of different ways - from Look At descriptions to a phone that lets you check in on how she's feeling about a variety of people in her life and the central topics occupying her mind. There's a trend in video games for stories to just be "about" one thing. Station to Station challenges that, as it covers so much else - college life, lived experiences, love and heartbreak, 2000s internet culture, music, city life and so much more. It covers a lot of ground and saying it is "about" any one of these things, especially given that it's a sort of memoir, feels iffy at best.
The only thing I miss about Perfect Tides is the previous game's setting (a thing this game actually alludes to!) Gone are the expansive screens with nothing to do in them - Mara usually only has a few locations she can go to at a time, with everything else being inaccessible one way or another. Strictly speaking, this is better for the gameplay, as in the original there is plenty of time wasted just trying to find out what you can do in a given time period. But, it also let me savor the lush backgrounds and especially the quiet night scenes of the island, and there's plenty of rich vibes to be found in the City setting of this game that I don't think are sticking to my memory as much.
All in all, this is a really great piece of craft and design that results in an honest story involving, but not necessarily "about", a girl's journey into adulthood, and a college story that doesn't stick to a template of what college life "should" be like.
