Still, it's impressive Dear Esther doesn't need puzzles or mechanics to draw you in.
You feel the urge to stop and stare, to wander off the path and explore, but there's always the awareness in the back of your mind that there's not really anything to find. You can't help but imagine a version of this game that lets you touch and feel, picking up pebbles on the beach to throw into the sea or leafing through old books in an abandoned bothy.
There's very little interactivity a torch comes out automatically in the dark, but that's pretty much the limit. Dear Esther asks nothing of you but to occupy this world. If nothing else, Dear Esther presents one of the most absorbing and believable worlds in gaming. The perfect isolation of the island communicates a loneliness and sense of suspense that's far beyond what traditional games attempt. Music is often absent, leaving you to listen to the wind and crashing waves, but fades in and out with exquisite timing to emphasise moments of narrative significance. Oblique graffiti starts to appear on cliff faces and cave walls as time wears on, and it maintains a sense of mystery right through to its conclusion. You are led, without ever really feeling like you are being led, by subtle visual cues that stand out against the landscape and draw you towards them – a low-hanging moon, a slowly blinking communication tower, or the yawning mouth of a cave. You walk from lonely, rocky beaches up wind-stripped hillside slopes, through richly detailed underground caves and through the skeletons of long-decayed ships. You don't actually do anything except guide the invisible protagonist around the island, taking in the natural beauty of the coast and the startling luminescence of the underground caves. Later on, his commentary becomes stranger and more impassioned. In the first chapter, the narrator talks mostly in beautifully phrased snippets of information about the history of the island. As you step forwards, a voice begins to read fragments of a letter: 'Dear Esther.' - and so begins a journey through one of the most original first-person games of recent years. The writing is unashamedly florid, flitting all the time in an unsettling way between past and present, and usually addressed to the eponymous Esther, whose identity becomes clear as time goes on. Dear Esther immerses you in a stunningly realised world, a remote and desolate island somewhere in the outer Hebrides. Dear Esther is the story of a shipwrecked castaway on a remote Hebridean island, delivered through spoken lines of sumptuous, disconnected prose as you walk around the detailed landscape. If you're at all interested in exploring what games can do outside of the traditional genre templates, Dear Esther offers an unforgettable two hours that will leave you feeling edified, contemplative, and possibly even emotionally moved. Those who aren't, though, will be pleased to know that the atmosphere of the world and the incredible graphical detail do more than enough to justify the game as a commercial release.
#Dear esther scary mod#
I came to Dear Esther fresh I read the discussion around the original mod with interest, but never actually played it, and I'm guessing that many potential purchasers will be in the same boat.
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