Is This the Most Literary Video Game of All Time?

Josh Lambert on Meredith Gran’s Perfect Tides: Station to Station

By Josh Lambert, March 13, 2026

The best way I can describe Meredith Gran’s recently released video game Perfect Tides: Station to Station—or at least the best way I can describe it to people who read contemporary literature—is that it feels like a version Elif Batuman’s novels The Idiot and Either/Or that you can step inside of. Batuman’s novels offer the exquisite discomfort of gazing inside the head of an anxious, perspicacious, self-serious millennial college student as she flails around campus and makes bad decisions. Gran insists that you do all the flailing yourself.

Gran started out making comics. As a student at the School of the Visual Arts in the first years of the millennium, she already had an audience; she apologized in 2004 and 2005 about not updating her series “Skirting Danger” as she worked on finals and her undergraduate animation thesis. In her twenties, she was a member of the Pizza Island collective in Brooklyn, with BoJack Horseman’s Lisa Hanawalt and Sarah Glidden of How to Understand Israel in 60 Days or Less; during those years, Gran was writing and drawing Octopus Pie, a comic series that ran from 2007 to 2017 and has lately been collected in a gorgeous box set. She turned to making interactive games not as an escape from the slice-of-life storytelling she had been doing in comics, but as a way of deepening her practice. As she put it, games offer “a means of not only viewing, but immersing oneself in the thoughts, feelings, sacred objects and desires of the protagonist.”

With the release of Station to Station, it has become clear that Gran is creating one of the most expansive, technically complex, and affecting autofictions of our time. If you haven’t played a video game since Tetris or Mario Kart, and if you assume a game could never make you feel the way an excellent novel does, Station to Station was made for you. Or, since I can assume you’re a reader or writer or both, let me put it this way: Station to Station is a video game in which your most consequential decision might be whether you choose to read Susan Sontag’s Against Interpretation, bell hooks’ All About Love, or The Odyssey.

As in the best autofictions, Gran has articulated a whole universe, anchored in the perspective of one individual.

At the end of Gran’s first game, Perfect Tides (2022), her protagonist, Mara Whitefish, is 16, and spending less time on online fanfic forums and more time outside. In one memorable sequence, she takes mushrooms with her friend Lily and sneaks into an abandoned hotel to trip out on the graffiti and silently ponder her father’s death. In the sequel, Station to Station, we meet up with Mara a few years later in the middle of her first year of college. She’s a student at an art college in downtown New York (think SVA, but here called “SUCS”). Over about eight hours of playtime, you spend a year as Mara, broken up into four seasons. In each season, you have a few days during which you may or may not have time to read, as well as writing assignments to complete, classes and parties to attend, and choices to make.

As in the first Perfect Tides, Station to Station does not offer character customization or wild, free-wheeling narrative options. No matter what you do, you are still Mara, a very anxious, talkative, occasionally brash and sometimes insightful young woman, and you’re still going to have most of the same relationships and conversations. The main thing your choices dictate, here, is whether Mara is any good as a writer.

The way this works is unlike any game I’ve played (the closest analogue is the beloved Estonian RPG Disco Elysium). As you move through the world as Mara, you can talk to people about many topics—movies, sex, or death, or any of the people in your life. Occasionally a conversation, or something you read, will deepen your thinking on a topic, in a visualized, quantified way: inside Mara’s brain, number go up. The stronger Mara’s grasp on a topic, the more useful the topic will be when she deploys it in a writing assignment. As in real life, you have limited time to read, and since the game takes place in the early 2000s, you can write only when you have access to an iMac at the library, a friend’s laptop, or a PC at home.

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