![]() The original mod was rough around the edges but still full of its own earnest beauty, the island dotted with all manner of quietly mysterious or poignant discoveries-a pile of stones marking a grave behind a shed, the skeletal remains of a centuries-old shipwreck-but the commercial facelift allows it to truly shine. There’s a reason the remake took years rather than months despite being set on a single small island. Go ahead, I’ll wait.Īny given snapshot from this game could be framed and hung in a museum as a masterful landscape piece. ![]() That may sound hyperbolic, but just take a moment to soak in some of the screenshots in our image gallery. This is perhaps the most beautiful and immersive setting I’ve ever seen in a game. The first game had decent enough graphics, but bringing on a talented 3D design artist this time around paid off handsomely. While Valve’s games have always looked great, designer Robert Briscoe has lapped them all with his superb remake of the original mod’s eerie, melancholy island. It’s hard to believe that what you’re looking at upon first starting Dear Esther is the eight year-old Source engine that has powered every Valve Software release since Half-Life 2. But for anyone who wants to experience a brilliantly-crafted work of interactive art, you will certainly be rewarded. If that doesn’t sound interesting to you on some level, then this may not be the experiment for you. That may sound shallow, but the experience of “playing” Dear Esther feels profoundly deep and satisfying, assuming you can shed your old notions of what a game must be. The only carrot on a stick drawing you further in is a blinking red light in the distance and an innate sense of curiosity. Is it really a game at all? This title strips away all familiar conventions of “gameplay” and focuses entirely on atmosphere and presentation. This is a game that takes place as much in your imagination as it does onscreen.īut here we return to the question above. ![]() To say any more would be a disservice to your own sense of discovery, as piecing the various plot threads together (inasmuch as they ever can be pieced together) is a large part of the experience. The narrator is, presumably, reading from letters written to the titular Esther, and the topics sway from memories of a car crash to the journal of one of the island’s previous explorers to the nature of the mysterious culture that originally inhabited the area. ![]() You have no choice but to explore the island, and as you do so, snippets of narration play out in a semi-random manner, giving a vague and haunting context for your presence there. There are no inventory items, no NPCs, and no puzzles. The player controls an unnamed, unseen protagonist who lands on an unnamed island. It is, at heart, an exploration of the possibilities of nonlinear storytelling in games. Most notably, the graphics have been completely reworked with stunning results.ĭear Esther is the brainchild of University of Portsmouth researcher Dan Pinchbeck. The core game is exactly the same, but now features the polish that comes with a larger team and budget. Originally released in 2008 as a free mod for Half-Life 2, Dear Esther became a cult hit and secured both the funding and talent necessary for an enhanced commercial re-release. Strange because it is a bizarre work of surrealism, brave because it tries things few other games have ever dared, and beautiful because it succeeds, at least at what it attempts to do. Adventure gamers are no strangers to the endless debates over genre definitions, but it’s rare that we ask the even more fundamental question, “What is a game?” Dear Esther, from developer thechineseroom and level designer Robert Briscoe, is an extraordinarily strange, brave, and above all beautiful experience.
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