Unique? Yes Fun? Not exactly Worth playing? Maybe
"Well, that's how you tell an artsy game from the rest," he thinks to himself.
WaZelda starts walking up the hill and all of a sudden a British voice comes through his headphones. He talks about the eremite, whoever he might be, just as waZelda is discovering a cave, presumably the home of the eremite.
The voice definitely has a personality. WaZelda imagines the narrator sitting in an old armchair. His hair is brown and unruly, his glasses large. His face makes him appear older than he really is. He looks tired, tired of life and the universe.
WaZelda presses on and soon falls down from the patch and onto the beach again. The path before him often split into two, but always come back again. From time to time the rusty voice appears again, mostly leaving him confused and uncertain what is going on. The island seems empty and while the signs that someone was there ones are many, there is little suggesting that someone is there currently.
The voice of the narrator is the only company waZelda has and he finds himself not paying enough attention to the word, or at least not making sense of them. The landscape has its charm, but quickly becomes a lot of the same.
Then it happens. WaZelda lay eyes on a red light far into the distance. What could it be? Is it an emergency signal? Is there actually someone else on this island? WaZelda presses onwards more determined now than ever.
Soon he comes close enough to see that the red light isn't a signal, but a piece of electricity coming from a building at the top of a hill. Still waZelda can feel the determination burning within him. He wants to reach that red light at some point. He can't go towards it at the moment, so he follows the linear path forwards and soon enters the caves.
The caves are magnificent. He often finds himself stopping just to look at all the details. He often comes across drawings of nerves and atoms. Some of the atoms have a structure that is familiar to him, like the hexagonal shapes of sugars.
"I wonder if these would make sense to chemists and biologists," he thinks to himself.
Suddenly waZelda finds himself on the bottom of an ocean. He sees pieces of a highway, though how it ended up under water he has no idea.
"That was weird," he thinks when he gets back up on land.
WaZelda becomes aware that the general lack of excitement in the game makes it so he suddenly starts getting excited by the smallest things. Every single lit candle he comes across is a pleasant surprised and when he finds an old black and white photo in a frame it is amazing. It is as if the game has tricked him into lowering his standards such that everything becomes a positive.
WaZelda walks along a beach feeling quite lost. He hasn't even managed to figure out whether the narrator is supposed to be the character he is playing or if the character is Esther, reading notes that the narrator has left behind. There are suddenly so many candles that they start losing their appeal and waZelda is getting more bored than ever.
Then there it is. WaZelda finds himself at the bottom of the hill leading up to the red light. In that moment he realizes that he will get to go to the light and it will be the end of the game. His excitement fills up again as he makes his way towards the top of the hill. He reaches the red eyes and the game ends in a way he would never expect.
WaZelda leans back in his chair. While he isn't left with a clear sense of what was going on, the game did give a particular mood and atmosphere. It simply had a distinct vibe to it. WaZelda aren't sure if he would call Dear Esther a good game – or even a game to be honest – but as he exits to desktop he does not regret purchasing the game, although he has no desire ever to play it again.