Perfect Tides: Station to Station Is the Best Game About Being Eighteen
A webcomic artist's second point-and-click follows her teenage heroine to college, cringe and all. It won the IGF's narrative award. Why Meredith Gran's millennial coming-of-age story is worth your weekend.
It is 2003, and Mara Whitefish has finally escaped the island. She is eighteen, a freshman studying creative writing in the big city, and absolutely certain she is about to become someone. The game knows better, and it loves her anyway.
Perfect Tides: Station to Station is the second game from Three Bees, the Philadelphia studio of cartoonist Meredith Gran. It launched on Windows and macOS on 22 January 2026, reached Nintendo Switch in May, and in March won Excellence in Narrative at the 2026 Independent Games Festival, where it was also nominated for the Seumas McNally Grand Prize.
From island girl to city writer
The first Perfect Tides, released in February 2022, was set in 2000 on an island town off the US East Coast. Mara was a lonely teenager, grieving her father, retreating into online forums and fan fiction. Critics adored it; Kotaku called it an incredible portrait of adolescence and Polygon put it on its list of the 50 best games of 2022.
Station to Station picks her up three years later in a place simply called the City. It is about the momentum and whiplash of young adulthood: new friends, new crushes, big ideas and terrible decisions.
How it plays
At heart, this is a classic 2D point-and-click adventure: talk to people, collect items, use them in the right place. Gran has cited King's Quest VII and The Dig as touchstones for the series.
The sequel adds a clever twist. Mara develops "topics", from anarchism to drugs to movies, by living her life. Her level in each topic shapes the conversations she can have and, crucially, how her writing projects turn out. In effect, the game asks you to build a person, and then shows you what kind of writer that person becomes.
It is a smart answer to an old problem with adventure games, where dialogue trees often feel like menus. Here, what Mara knows and cares about changes over time, so a conversation you have in the second half of the game can land very differently from the same scene early on. Your Mara and a friend's Mara may turn out to be quite different people, with quite different stories to tell.
Funded by fans
Like its predecessor, Station to Station was crowdfunded. Its Kickstarter launched in August 2022 and reached its $80,000 goal. That is a small budget for a long, densely written adventure, and Gran's team made the most of it with expressive, sketch-like art that looks like it walked out of a comic.
Reviews have been warm. The A.V. Club praised the writing as a more mature evolution of the series, and Polygon highlighted the writing mechanic and called the game an ode to millennial cringe.
Why it matters
Most coming-of-age games are about teenagers saving the world. Perfect Tides is about a teenager trying to save face, and failing, and growing. In our view it is one of the most honest pieces of writing in games this year, funny in the way real embarrassment is funny, and its IGF award is well earned.
Where to play
Station to Station is on Steam for Windows and macOS and on Nintendo Switch. You do not need to have played the first Perfect Tides, but it is well worth it, and it is on Steam for Windows. For more 2026 IGF winners, see our Titanium Court story.