The high level of environmental detail puts other elements of the game in stark contrast: walking through the landscape cause no dynamic sound to occur and the protagonist seems to drift, ghostlike over the landscape. This is one of the reasons that the game suits its medium: the manner by which its audience “discovers” the plot simply wouldn’t work in the same way if it was presented as words on a page or framed shots in a film.ĭespite this success, the world of Dear Esther is also strangely lifeless in other ways. Not only do story elements come through by letting players happen upon, say, a makeshift altar created around a damaged car tire - the environment also functions as a key element in the creation of Dear Esther’s grim mood.
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Like the games that provide Dear Esther’s graphical framework - Valve’s Half-Life series and the Source engine - the fine details players will encounter throughout their exploration of the landscape are an essential part of the narrative. The environment is, ultimately, as much of the story as anything else because of moments like those. Leaping into a hole in the ground toward a dark body of water far below is as much of a comment on the player’s willingness, by this point, to submit to mortal danger as it is to the protagonist’s resignation to his own death.
When the protagonist is making his way through a series of interconnected caverns with rushing waterfalls, phosphorescent mushrooms and dripping stalactites we, the players, are as overcome with the grandeur of the scenery as he is by the immensity of his emotional journey. This attention to graphical fidelity pays off very well and helps to create the kind of wonder that makes the player want to simply stop and admire the various locations they move through during their travel across the island.Ĭertain moments are appropriately breathtaking.
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Developers thechineseroom and Robert Briscoe have taken the framework of their original Half-Life 2 mod and painstakingly reconstructed their work. The confusion that comprises much of the game becomes clear enough by the time it’s wrapped up (roughly an hour and a half after it begins) and the bewilderment that players will feel on their first playthrough is an essential part of the narrative.ĭear Esther looks beautiful, the wonderfully realized aesthetic of a remote island in the Hebrides lending as much to the atmosphere of the game as any of the words spoken by its protagonist. Many lines of dialogue are overwritten or so vague that they discourage any sense of feeling “in place” amidst a setting that is already so mysterious. The details of the story, once the player has uncovered them, are simple, but the telling of them is the remarkable part.Īt times the inner monologue prose that provides the bulk of Dear Esther’s exposition can be needlessly obtuse. These first few moments of the game set the pace for the rest of Dear Esther, a title that moves extremely slowly, but always encourages forward movement. Though it will likely make you question where the line should be drawn between interactive and passive media, exploring this title for the first time is a truly unique experience and one that’s worth entering into without any preconceptions. Whether you think it is good, bad or even a videogame at all, Dear Esther is worth your time if you’re willing to take part in a fairly successful experiment in videogame narrative. Since the plot and the sense of exploration that goes into Dear Esther is so instrumental to the impression it makes, it also doesn’t seem possible to go forward with writing the rest of this review without putting a big fat warning up front: play the game first.
It isn’t interactive enough to be a game and too much so to fit into either of the other categories. That’s because it doesn’t really belong to any of these forms of traditional media. It’s very difficult to review Dear Esther using the kind of standards that would apply to the average videogame or, for that matter, even the average film or book.
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