It's January 30th, and I've played 5 hours total of Perfect Tides: Station to Station. That's not much more than last time if you are paying attention; my life has become immensely more busy in the space between last week and now, and those kinds of transitions always seem to wipe me out. I cannot fathom where I could have found time to play more this week. That's fine by me, I am enjoying the process of soaking myself in the far off world of 2003.

I'm about 1/3 of the way through I think, and I am just so hopelessly in love with this game. I'd also like to remedy something I said in my last post, I do not think I know better than Mara, not by a long shot. I'm getting a little bit sad seeing her ability to learn, and her willingness to really put herself out there. If I was reading Walter Benjamin at age 18 instead of smoking any weed I could find by the river, I wonder if things would have shaped up a little differently. Mara even smokes bad weed too and somehow I'm watching her grow leaps and bounds in some ways—I can't help feel a little melancholy...

I'm finding the gameplay systems extremely rewarding. I feel like games often aim to create illusions of scope; TellTale games come to mind, where on a blind playthrough your choices feel impactful and cumulative, but as you kind of unwrap the game you can see the seams and grasp the actual scope of the game. Perfect Tides: STS currently feels immense for the kind of experience it's delivering. Not only can you read books to learn more and (hopefully) write better, but you can trade books with your friends, and they might like that book, they might not, sometimes they want to hear what you think about the book they lend you—so you better read it before you see them again! I had an experience where a character's reaction to a book I lent them recontextualized their characterization almost completely. I'm finding it extremely rewarding, even if the gameplay kind of conditions you into becoming a desperate scavenger searching every screen for just a piece of conversation that will make returns in a little bit of knowledge, that seems to me what Mara is experiencing though..

Overall it's just extremely creative, and detailed, and incredibly compelling as an experience. I'm still enjoying the 2003-isms even though they are so incredibly prevalent. Even an extending set piece relating to a song I despise thinking of let alone hearing was done in such an elegant playful way that I felt my cold heart warm just a few degrees. This is easily my favorite game that I've played maybe since I played the first Perfect Tides, and again, I'm about 1/3 of the ways in.