Dear Esther (2012)
The Chinese Room
Available for PC - via Steam
It’s hard to tell the tale of a knight in a chess game - “He took two steps forward and one to the left.” Like chess pieces, videogame characters are limited by the rigid nature of their medium.
Take a beautifully detailed videogame environment, strip out the gameplay mechanics, eliminate the complex button combinations and you have Dear Esther. It’s ostensibly a videogame. But it’s one that puts story at its core.
Dear Esther is experienced from the first person, or character’s point of view, in the style of the modern shooter. It’s controlled with a keyboard and mouse and can be played on your PC. The game uses a single button to walk, with the mouse used to look around.
Set on a remote Scottish island, Dear Esther weaves the natural beauty of the environment, a haunting soundtrack and simple narration into a personal story of loneliness and loss. The experience feels like an interactive audio installation, slowly doling out the history of it’s protagonist.
Exploring Dear Esther’s desolate landscape, triggers excerpts of letters written by a man to a lost loved-one to be read aloud. Often these snippets provide background on the setting. The island has not always been empty, and stumbling on an abandoned cottage for example, relates the tale of the shepherd who once lived there.
Writer/creator, Dr. Dan Pinchbeck, from the University of Portsmouth’s School of Creative Technologies, and graphical artist, Robert Briscoe, have presented an intentionally ambiguous narrative. It remains unclear whether the player is taking on the role of the protagonist or simply following in his footsteps. What is known is that he has come to the island to escape the everyday and to deal with his grief following a fatal car accident. He has knowledge of the island’s past, through an acquaintance who has studied the history of the area. Parallel stories unfold of the men who have lived and died on the island.
Though overwritten at times, strong voice acting keeps the experience moving forward. Your journey across the island’s beaches, cliftops and ultimately down into the caves below follows the protagonist literally and figuratively to rock bottom. In this context the occasional hackneyed line is easily overlooked.
The designers have carefully paced the release of this information. The island’s large surface area isn’t immediately open for exploration. Narrow pathways snake up cliff sides and expertly placed landmarks draw the eye and the player towards the developer’s goal. The character’s movement is slow, but believable giving time to take in the natural beauty of the setting.
Dear Esther’s real achievement is in the realisation of its world. It is here that the experience swings closest to its videogaming roots. But the island itself is small. Teams of artists at larger studios are never given the chance to lavish such high levels of detail on every aspect of an environment. Scrub grass and heather sway believably in the sea air. The sound of the wind, the creaking of an aging ship-wreck or the call of the sea birds over head all serve to ground the player in the world. Moisture glints on the surface of wet rocks. Moon-light reflects off the surface of the sea. With a pair of headphones and a darkened room this careful audio and graphical design becomes uniquely immersive.
Suspension of disbelief is required. The gamer in me wanted to interact with the world, to reach out and move objects, to open doors and root out the island’s secrets. The experience is closer to passive entertainment, to reading or watching a film, than to gaming but the sense of exploring and unravelling a space, which lies at the heart of the best first-person games, is retained here.
At seven euro, and taking an hour and a half to two hours to complete, Dear Esther is comparable to an evening at the cinema. By distilling what makes videogame worlds so enthralling, while bypassing the interactions that make them appear obtuse, it’s an experience that’s easy to recommend.
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