Three Bees’ second game, Perfect Tides: Station to Station, is another semi-autobiographical point-and-click adventure game that takes place right after their first game, Perfect Tides. Both games have some of the best comedic, emotional, and relatable writing I’ve ever had the pleasure of reading.
Station to Station follows Mara Whitefish as she starts her first year at university studying creative writing in the early 2000s. Having spent her whole life on a small island called Perfect Tides, the move to The City is a big adjustment. Mara navigates the challenges that come with that along with maintaining relationships and keeping up with her studies, all while battling some impostor’s syndrome around her writing abilities.
The chosen medium only enriches the writing, as every bit of flavor text is a piece of Mara’s personality. We see the world through Mara’s eyes, and her inner monologue is both clever and hilarious. It helps the world feel alive and it also helps us get to know her. Having played the first game, I saw how much she’d grown since, but also how much she still had left to learn. If any of this is interesting to you, I highly recommend you go into the game blind. The rest of this article will spoil key story beats to analyze and praise its writing. I can’t recommend experiencing first hand enough.
My praise for this game mostly comes from how its writing makes each character feel distinct and real. Though some of the stuff they get up to is absurd, it could certainly happen among university students all eager to find themselves. Mara is the standout, which is perhaps unsurprising considering her role as the protagonist. She is frustrating, sometimes annoying, incredibly funny, but above all of that, she feels incredibly real.
Playing as Mara felt like having a mirror held up to a past version of me. The image was distorted and slightly off, but the broad strokes were the same. She’s insecure, she’s trying her best, and she’s very eager to be seen and loved. This contributed to making her feel real, but also to how frustrating she felt to watch, as I could only control her in-game actions so much. There were moments where I wished I could shake some sense into her, but I couldn’t. She is her own person and has to live and learn from her experiences. I imagine many of my friends felt like this when I was younger every time they desperately tried to give me advice.
My favorite moment regarding this was involving Adam, Mara’s much older and very controlling boyfriend. I spent the entirety of the game’s spring portion wishing that Mara would break up with him, but it took her until the summer. The way she thought about him contrasted with the way he spoke to her were fantastic. Mara would swear to herself that she loved him, all while wishing she could ignore his calls. She knew, somewhere deep down, that none of this was healthy.
This is something I could heavily relate to. Not the exact circumstance, but the broad strokes. Sticking around people that I know aren’t good for me because I had this desperate desire to belong and fit in somewhere. If I left this group, where else would I go? How would I stay afloat without anything to hold on to but myself? So Mara breaks up with Adam and goes almost directly to the next guy, and then the next, desperate to find that sense of belonging that she needed after having moved to such a new place so far from home. And none of them are right for her, whether it be because of genuine incompatibility or self-sabotage. In just a year, Mara goes through a lot with all kinds of relationships.
To cope with this, Mara writes. Using what she’s learned about certain topics, Mara writes pieces for her personal portfolio and for her essays, which is why it’s important to engage with the world. That way, her writing improves. As she herself says, “I can’t just write without being a part of the world”. Many times, the game moved me to tears, and that line was one occasion. A lot of the game’s writing struck me personally. It may have been because I played it right after I graduated, so I had just been there. I has just been exactly where Mara was a few years ago.
Among the many differences between us is the fact that I had the benefit of hindsight. I knew, from where I was standing, that everything Mara was going through she’d eventually be on the other side of. She didn’t, though, much like I didn’t see an end to my assignments when I was in the thick of it. Eventually I’d make it through, and so will Mara. All I could do was play through it and watch as she got better, much like I did. Very often, it just takes time.
Perfect Tides: Station to Station is not about me, per se. However, it is about people like me. Through its blunt and down to earth writing, the game touched my heart in ways few character arcs have. I can’t recommend the game enough. Even if it’s not wholly relatable, at least one part of it is bound to be touching.
