Dear Esther jars at first in forcing one to relinquish this activeness, this agency. It requires a passivity that is easy to submit to as a reader or as part of an audience, but hard to accept as a player. This nature, of action and reaction between the player and the machine, makes introspection hard to achieve. You are not just an observer you are also an actor. The interactivity of games revolves around an obvious philosophy of “doing something.” This makes games an active medium. In terms of literature, there is a type of conflict taking place here: Man versus himself. This is his story of redemption, of purification. His breathing becomes staggered, his voice rises and resonates. The game does not over-explain, or over-expose. He reads more, reveals more, unifies his references to Paul on his way to Damascus and historical allusions with the nightmare of his life. The environment begs you move forward, but on some level, you want to stay a little bit. And it is a metaphor for the man himself, his cave paintings, and the refuse he leaves behind. It is a metaphor for his dead wife, whom he reads to.
#DEAR ESTHER PS3 FULL#
It is a metaphor for the history of the island, deep and rich and full of fossils. The “ghostliness” is a metaphor for what this man left behind when he came to the island, for all the failures he could never escape. Dear Esther is defined as a “ghost” story and yet the literal ghosts are not explicitly an element of the game. There’s an economy here to the unification of the elements. The scrawling on the walls, the rusted, abandoned, discarded objects in the environment, help tell the story.
Where are the encounters? Where’s the action? What do I do? You walk. Maybe you feel bored for a while, detached.
You don’t need to be a classically trained actor to feel connected to this man. Nothing but a game can really guide you to feeling this kind of immediate empathy for the character. Nothing but a videogame can do this, regardless of how conventionally or obviously it is, in fact, a game. The caverns, the stalactites, the blues and greens and punctuated starry shimmer of the adjoining caves, are oppressively beautiful. You feel like the man in Wanderer Above the Sea Fog looking out over a vast, devastating, consuming sea. You walk up a crag into a field of weeds and the sea pans out over the horizon. It’s a cliché to say so, but you almost taste it. Forking paths will trigger more and more fragments of his letters. You walk forward, and every so often, you trigger his monologue. Maybe this is the image of a man crumbling in the face of extreme personal loss. Strength of will, for meticulously leaving artifacts of his story painted all over the island for making his way up to the edge of that cliff for taking the plunge. If videogames are power fantasies, what is the source of this man’s power? Nothing obvious. Learn to empathize with the man, and he will reveal himself to you. But who do you think you are? There are some things you can’t control. He is not some container character, waiting for you to fill him in with your “agency” and your “choices,” deciding all by yourself his personality and behavior. Meet him: a tragic figure, seeking redemption, seeking release, at odds with himself. Well, to yourself.īut this is not “you.” This is the man. Since when is any game for everyone? This game has no win condition. I feel compelled to remind you, brother gamer, before we begin, that this game is not for everyone. Well, maybe “hero” is the wrong word here. The “experimental” game-and some have argued fruitlessly whether or not Dear Esther even counts as a game-puts the player in first-person control of an unnamed hero. The game, first released in 2008 by developer thechineseroom as a Source engine mod, has since been re-released as a full game on Steam. There’s just an island.ĭear Esther takes about two hours to play, if that.
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