It may not be a traditional game, but Dear Esther is an interactive narrative masterpiece.
Dear Esther has no opening cutscene. The game opens with you standing alone on the windswept beach of an island in the Hebrideans off the coast of Scotland. An abandoned lighthouse looms before you, and an eloquent, slightly delusional letter's opening read--or perhaps remembered or even imagined--by your own character welcomes you to the experience. The game makes no effort to explain why you are there, who you are, or what you're hoping to find-at least not yet. It doesn't tell you where to go, what to do, or how to act. There is no "Press C to crouch" or "Click to use" tutorial, there are no other characters to interact with, there's no objective indicator, and there is no map. It is simply you, alone and confused on an abandoned island. A radio tower's faint red light blinks solemnly at you atop a cliff in the hazy distance, and eventually you will instinctively head that way. The island knows you. It knows how you think and how you'll act, and it will use that knowledge to guide you instead of resorting to massive "go here" markers. With that in mind, you take your first timid, uncertain steps towards the distant tower as the wind whips around you and howls through the empty lighthouse keep. So begins a short but incredibly powerful journey into the fractured mind of your character and a profound examination of what a game-and a story-can be.
I can't really go into the details of what happens on Dear Esther's island without giving too much away or coloring your perceptions of the experience with my own, and that isn't my place in this instance. What I can tell you is that it will play with your psychology. It will force you into situations that you'd rather not be in and push you into making decisions that go against every instinct in your reptilian, jaded gamer brain. It will make you wonder what the hell you are doing, where you are, and if your surroundings are even real. It will explore the meaning of the word "metaphor" like few things you've ever experienced. Above all, it will make you think, and I don't mean that in the typical gaming context of deciding which box to push onto which pressure plate. No, Dear Esther will make you really, truly, deeply think.
The true beauty of Dear Esther's tale is that it doesn't require the story to be fully explained in order to succeed. Even if I tried to convey exactly what I think happened, it wouldn't matter. The fractured, ambiguous nature of the experience ensures that nearly every player will interpret and react to what happens on the island differently. Some will find themselves deeply touched or perhaps even troubled by Dear Esther's tale. Others will see details and connections that the first group may have missed-details that could entirely change their outlook on the protagonist and his plight. Admittedly, some will simply find Dear Esther boring, and to be honest I don't know that I could really blame them. For me, however, Dear Esther is a profound experiment into the very nature of storytelling in games. I felt like I got to know my character more intimately in my short time on the island than I have in other games whose gameplay reaches into the hundreds of hours, and I never even truly knew his name. It is one of the deepest, most powerfully emotional experiences I've ever had with a game. I won't say I broke into tears or wrote poetry after I finished Dear Esther, but I will say that it affected my emotional state for hours after I closed the program.
The island is simply stunning on a graphical level, especially given that it is entirely rendered in Valve's somewhat old Source Engine. Sparse vegetation waves gently in the breeze (more observant players will notice that it is still only 2D and will still turn to face you as you walk), water trickles through small ruts in the beach as the tide comes in, and the sun peeks timidly through thick clouds that hang like a blanket over your experience. It's all so vivid that you can practically feel the Atlantic breeze washing over you as you pick your way across the barren landscape, and that's just while you're outdoors. Prepare to have your mind blown once you enter the island's caves; I would be hard pressed to come up with a single other game environment that can rival their beauty. Lights flicker and play off of slick walls, subterranean waterfalls spill into deep, dark chasms, and stalactites hang dripping from the ceilings as stalagmites reach up in futility to meet them. Mysterious candles, drawings, and relics from the past also dot the landscape, though whether or not you interpret those as actual parts of the island or figments of your shattered imagination is up to you. Either way, it is all truly breathtaking and despite its short length I think that Dear Esther may actually feature the most believable, immersive game world that I've ever been to. True, it's not really open and you are forced through relatively narrow paths instead of being allowed to fully explore the island, but that sacrifice allows for a higher degree of graphical polish and attention to detail. Believe me, thechineseroom have certainly not squandered that opportunity. Simply put, Dear Esther is visually stunning in every way.
Shockingly, Dear Esther's sound design actually rivals the beauty of its visuals. Sound effects like wind sweeping over an open field or whistling through a deep fissure compliment the natural beauty of the island while the soft, steady drip of water in the caves manages to both unnerve and soothe you at the same time. Towards the end of the game I found myself walking an uncomfortably narrow path along a rocky cliff and on one occasion a sharp increase in the scream of the wind made me jerk instinctively away from the cliff's edge. That, my friends, is some incredible sound design. All of those ambient noises are backed by a haunting soundtrack that fits Dear Esther's atmosphere like a glove and manages to invoke the kind of thoughtful sadness that the game is built on. There are no people on the island with you--it was long ago abandoned for reasons that you are left to piece together--so there is no voice acting outside of your own character's narrative. Although some lines can come uncomfortably close to being pretentious or verbose (pot calling the kettle black, I know), their delivery is nearly always weighty and believable. They are also expertly spaced out through a system that triggers a narration only when you come across a certain location or object, meaning you will spend most of your time with only the lonely sounds of the empty island to keep you company. Sometimes I couldn't wait to hear the narrator's voice again just so things wouldn't seem so desolate, and I'm sure that the parallels between that player response and your character's own mental state were not drawn unintentionally.
While the atmosphere, sound design, and storytelling of Dear Esther may be layered and complex, its actual gameplay is anything but. The entire game is played with nothing but the abilities to walk and look around. There is no combat, there are no pieces of loot or collectable items to hunt down, and there is absolutely no real interaction with the environment. Some have decried this design decision as boring or uninspired and others have even gone so far as to say that its simplistic interaction disqualifies Dear Esther from even being considered a game at all. I disagree. Dear Esther never needs any more than what it gives you to be wholly satisfying. Your character moves slowly along relatively narrow, linear pathways because that is the only way to ensure that you are able to fully absorb what you need to in order to interpret the story. You are utterly alone on the island, so there's no need to run. That's especially true once you realize where your path has been leading you. There are no enemies to fight because your battle never was against physical forces and has already been lost anyway. You can't interact with your environment because to do so would diminish the game's very deliberate sense of helplessness. Some will wave these explanations off as excuses for poor design or lazy development, but I see them as surgical choices made to enhance the experience. I applaud the decision to avoid the trap of pandering to mainstream gamers' expectations at the expense of narrative weight. Puzzle solving, item collection, and combat couldn't possibly have done anything but hurt the experience, so I'm glad that they weren't shoehorned in. Dear Esther is a game that is unrepentantly focused solely on story, atmosphere, and the various interpretations that can come from the mixture of the two in a relative interactive vacuum. I don't think this model would work in every game nor do I think it should be overused, but in this case it works brilliantly and I wouldn't have it any other way. Heavy Rain, take notes.
I only have two real gripes about Dear Esther. The first is the length of the title, which at and hour and a half to two hours is pretty meager. The game does an awful lot in that short span of time and it encourages multiple playthroughs if you want to gather all the pieces of the island's puzzle, but even with those things considered it is awfully short by traditional standards. It hardly seems fair to judge an experience as untraditional as Dear Esther by traditional standards, however, and I personally found it to be well worth its $10 price tag on Steam due its sheer impact and beauty alone. Still, I'd love to see a more fleshed out version at some point in the future. Sadly, an actual sequel seems inappropriate for reasons you'll discover on your own.
My other complaint is that for reasons I will probably never understand, Dear Esther steals control away from the player at the moment in the narrative that direct control would have been most impactful. I won't spoil this moment for you, but I think that actually having to come to the conclusion of what you must do and then actually doing it would have been far more powerful than simply watching a cutscene. The decision to remove control from the player at the game's most crucial moment seems extremely odd in a piece of art (oh yeah, I went there) specifically tailored to masterfully make use of an interactive medium. It seems so odd, in fact, that I'm tempted to classify it as yet another of Dear Esther's mind games. Either way, for a brief moment my immersion in the world of Dear Esther was broken and I remembered that I was simply playing a game. Dear Esther can only succeed through cohesive, unbroken immersion, and any break in that flow is absolutely devastating to the experience as a whole. In my book, the developers really dropped the ball by tarnishing the ending of an otherwise incredibly personal experience with a disappointingly impersonal presentation.
When all is said and done, Dear Esther stands as a narrative masterpiece in the often flat, detached gaming medium. I've never played another game that can compare to the level of immersion or personal connection that Dear Esther provides, nor have I ever been so emotionally drawn into a game's story. Dear Esther is simultaneously saddening yet beautiful, lonely yet full of life, and basic yet undeniably fascinating. You won't spend much time with Dear Esther, but you won't need to. Your interpretation of the island will be different than mine, perhaps radically, and therein lays the game's beauty. No matter what your perceptions of Dear Esther, however, one thing is certain: it is an experience that will stay with you for a long time to come. It may not be a traditional game, but breaking tradition is often the first step and most important step on the staircase of innovation. Enjoy.