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

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

If you asked me to describe Perfect tides in a word, I would say honest. Give me two words and I’ll add an adverb with the appropriate weight: devastatingly honest.

Polygon recommends is our way of endorsing our favorite games. When we give a game the Polygon Recommends badge, it’s because we think the title is particularly challenging, entertaining, inventive, or fun – and worthy of incorporating into your schedule. If you want to see the best of the best for your platform(s) of choice, check out Most of the polygon.
The pixelated point-and-click adventure game created by online comic author Meredith Gran Octopus Pie, and his studio, Three Bees, sometimes shocked me with where he was willing to go and what he was willing to do. While Gran was using Octopus Pie to explore its 20 years, Perfect tides explores the life of a teenager in the early 2000s. Although I have never lived on an isolated island that is empty for three seasons of the year, where I had to take a ferry to go to school, it is a time I recognize: dial-up modems, AOL instant messaging, and intimate online communities. There is comfort in Perfect tidesbut there are also horrors.
I recognize the sheer terror and stupidity of being a teenager – a little weird, too – and the emotions that go with it. Arguing with siblings for screen time, both wanting and not wanting to be kissed, and being mean to your parents. Perfect tides projects an honest depiction of all kinds 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, stands with some new friends on a dock. She is with all these people and yet she still feels alone, as if she speaks another language. She confesses something that frightened me by its intensity: “You fantasized about a tragedy in your life that would make you love others. You dreamed that you had an excuse, a justification for how you are in people’s minds.

Image: Three bees
Perfect tides switch between those kinds of dark, complex feelings and silly, sometimes funny teenage drama over the six to seven hours it took me to play through the game.
“I really wanted to talk about loneliness, kind of a hopeless feeling that there’s too big of a gap between where you are and where you’d like to be,” Gran told Polygon. “There are a lot of movies and TV shows about kids that are just a few degrees off popularity – just something has to happen, there’s something special about them that just has to be unlocked. I didn’t want to approach it that way.
Gran wanted players to live in this lonely place. There are temporary escapes, of course: for Mara and me, it was in our online worlds and communities, the spaces where everything felt as real as the outside world, even when others said it shouldn’t. But there is no escaping adolescence and the confusion, joy and terror that go with it. That will change, but it’s hard to say when. “You will live in intense expectation of these changes.”

Image: Three bees
Perfect tides‘ the gameplay looks like an interpretation of this idea. There is no real end goal communicated to the player. In one case, I started with a simple task to complete: bring the groceries home. Once I figured this out – after struggling to figure out the mechanics for a while – I was left with only a few clues as to where to go or what to do next. Perfect tides feels aimless in a way that reinforces a wandering tale, but not in a way that takes me out of the game. And so I move from place to place, clicking around. When you use a scroll wheel, the cursor changes: there’s an eye for looking at things, a hand for touching things, and a little human icon for walking around. Items can also be removed from a backpack and used to interact with the world. The story comes from exploration, winding through the island and through Mara’s online life.
“Dreamed that you had an excuse, a justification for how you are in people’s minds.”Gran said she’s thought about it in the past while doing comics. This art form helped her consider the user experience, playing with form to control perspective as much as possible. This idea translated into a game; Perfect tides is his first. The big difference is that she’s able to watch people live Perfect tides in a way that’s not really possible with the comics. “The comic book version should be, like, I’m standing over you while you read the book out loud and react to things,” Gran said. “It would be impossible to get that.” Thanks to the Twitch streamers, this experience has been different: they’re there to put on a performance by experiencing the game. “I feel like a freak watching some of this stuff,” Gran laughed.

Image: Three bees
“Sometimes streamers are so disarmed by something that they react in a way that almost feels like there’s no audience there,” Gran said. “A lot of the time, streamers start remembering things about themselves and start relating to those things openly — very intimate, shameful, or horrible things that they come up with. […] It often feels like a group therapy session. I could never have expected something like this.”
Gran will continue to do comics, but she said games will likely be her medium “for the foreseeable future.”
“It made me realize that people can dig deeper into games,” Gran said. “You can interface with another human being in a way that like – I’ve never had that kind of connection with people before.”

#Octopus #Pie #comic #creator #nails #teen #feelings #debut #game #Perfect #Tides

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

If you asked me to describe Perfect tides in a word, I would say honest. Give me two words and I’ll add an adverb with the appropriate weight: devastatingly honest.

Polygon recommends is our way of endorsing our favorite games. When we give a game the Polygon Recommends badge, it’s because we think the title is particularly challenging, entertaining, inventive, or fun – and worthy of incorporating into your schedule. If you want to see the best of the best for your platform(s) of choice, check out Most of the polygon.
The pixelated point-and-click adventure game created by online comic author Meredith Gran Octopus Pie, and his studio, Three Bees, sometimes shocked me with where he was willing to go and what he was willing to do. While Gran was using Octopus Pie to explore its 20 years, Perfect tides explores the life of a teenager in the early 2000s. Although I have never lived on an isolated island that is empty for three seasons of the year, where I had to take a ferry to go to school, it is a time I recognize: dial-up modems, AOL instant messaging, and intimate online communities. There is comfort in Perfect tidesbut there are also horrors.
I recognize the sheer terror and stupidity of being a teenager – a little weird, too – and the emotions that go with it. Arguing with siblings for screen time, both wanting and not wanting to be kissed, and being mean to your parents. Perfect tides projects an honest depiction of all kinds 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, stands with some new friends on a dock. She is with all these people and yet she still feels alone, as if she speaks another language. She confesses something that frightened me by its intensity: “You fantasized about a tragedy in your life that would make you love others. You dreamed that you had an excuse, a justification for how you are in people’s minds.

Image: Three bees
Perfect tides switch between those kinds of dark, complex feelings and silly, sometimes funny teenage drama over the six to seven hours it took me to play through the game.
“I really wanted to talk about loneliness, kind of a hopeless feeling that there’s too big of a gap between where you are and where you’d like to be,” Gran told Polygon. “There are a lot of movies and TV shows about kids that are just a few degrees off popularity – just something has to happen, there’s something special about them that just has to be unlocked. I didn’t want to approach it that way.
Gran wanted players to live in this lonely place. There are temporary escapes, of course: for Mara and me, it was in our online worlds and communities, the spaces where everything felt as real as the outside world, even when others said it shouldn’t. But there is no escaping adolescence and the confusion, joy and terror that go with it. That will change, but it’s hard to say when. “You will live in intense expectation of these changes.”

Image: Three bees
Perfect tides‘ the gameplay looks like an interpretation of this idea. There is no real end goal communicated to the player. In one case, I started with a simple task to complete: bring the groceries home. Once I figured this out – after struggling to figure out the mechanics for a while – I was left with only a few clues as to where to go or what to do next. Perfect tides feels aimless in a way that reinforces a wandering tale, but not in a way that takes me out of the game. And so I move from place to place, clicking around. When you use a scroll wheel, the cursor changes: there’s an eye for looking at things, a hand for touching things, and a little human icon for walking around. Items can also be removed from a backpack and used to interact with the world. The story comes from exploration, winding through the island and through Mara’s online life.
“Dreamed that you had an excuse, a justification for how you are in people’s minds.”Gran said she’s thought about it in the past while doing comics. This art form helped her consider the user experience, playing with form to control perspective as much as possible. This idea translated into a game; Perfect tides is his first. The big difference is that she’s able to watch people live Perfect tides in a way that’s not really possible with the comics. “The comic book version should be, like, I’m standing over you while you read the book out loud and react to things,” Gran said. “It would be impossible to get that.” Thanks to the Twitch streamers, this experience has been different: they’re there to put on a performance by experiencing the game. “I feel like a freak watching some of this stuff,” Gran laughed.

Image: Three bees
“Sometimes streamers are so disarmed by something that they react in a way that almost feels like there’s no audience there,” Gran said. “A lot of the time, streamers start remembering things about themselves and start relating to those things openly — very intimate, shameful, or horrible things that they come up with. […] It often feels like a group therapy session. I could never have expected something like this.”
Gran will continue to do comics, but she said games will likely be her medium “for the foreseeable future.”
“It made me realize that people can dig deeper into games,” Gran said. “You can interface with another human being in a way that like – I’ve never had that kind of connection with people before.”

#Octopus #Pie #comic #creator #nails #teen #feelings #debut #game #Perfect #Tides