Compared to the smooth hand-drawn animation that's popular in modern indie games, the low-res 2D visuals in Perfect Tides: Station to Station can conjure up derisive memes about MS Paint, or those awful CD-i Zelda games. Yet the rough but detailed images from the game's creator, Meredith Gran, so vividly capture college life in the big city, from crowded, sweaty student dorm parties to the days when checking your emails required logging into a public library computer. And that rougher style suits her well.
"I find that it's a little bit more forgiving to draw with a low-res style - you can get both a rougher drawing and a more perfect drawing," she tells me. It's an aesthetic that naturally gives off a nostalgic vibe for a game set in 2003, as also given away with film posters of The Matrix Reloaded and Donnie Darko, a curvy pink iMac, and the timeless (indestructible) design of the Nokia 3310 phone that your teen adult protagonist, Mara Whitefish, owns.
