Octopus Pie comic creator nails teen feelings in her debut game Perfect Tides

polygon.com:

If you asked me to describe Perfect Tides in one word, I’d call it honest. Give me two words and I’d tack on an adverb with appropriate weight: devastatingly honest.

The pixelated point-and-click adventure game created by Meredith Gran, the author of online comic Octopus Pie, and her studio, Three Bees, sometimes shocked me with where it was willing to go and what it was willing to do. While Gran used Octopus Pie to explore her 20s, Perfect Tides explores the life of a teenager in the early 2000s. Though I’ve never lived on an isolated island that’s empty for three seasons of the year, where I had to take a ferry to school, it’s a time period I recognize: dial-up modems, AOL instant messaging, and intimate online communities. There’s comfort to Perfect Tides, but there are horrors, too.

I recognize the sheer terror and stupidity of being a teenage girl — kind of a weird one, at that — and the emotions that come with it. The arguing with siblings for screen time, both wanting and not wanting to be kissed, and being petty to your parents. Perfect Tides projects an honest representation of all sorts of pain, the kind of pain I don’t like to admit even to myself. There’s one particular scene that stands out: Mara, the main character, is standing with some new friends on a dock. She’s with all these people and yet still feels alone, like she speaks a different language. She admits something to herself that scared me with how intensely it resonated: “You fantasized about a tragedy in your life that would endear you to others. You dreamt of having some excuse, some justification for the way you are in people’s minds.”

Perfect Tides switches back and forth between these sorts of dark, complex feelings and the silly, sometimes