Gamers are more inquisitive by nature they want to get up and walk around and poke things and collect stuff and do things that tend to break stories. Cinema has a rich tradition of obscure, meditative stories that are open to interpretation, but films have the luxury of an audience who do nothing bit sit and gawp at a screen. It’s not often that something so experimental comes along, and I enjoyed the mysterious ambiguity, although I’m sure it’s not everyone’s cup of tea. There’s a lot of potential here the combination of interactivity and strong narrative, well-told, is really powerful.Īnd despite a few rough edges, I really enjoyed Dear Esther. It reminded me of the interactive trailer for Super 8 that came with Portal 2 – not a technical triumph, or a stunning graphical showcase, but an interesting way of using existing media to tell stories in a new way. The lack of interactivity and choice means that there’s no worrying about whether players will choose A or B, or if they’ll shoot an important NPC, or start jumping around and teabagging corpses and generally making a mess of things.Īll games live somewhere on a spectrum between pure gameplay and storytelling, but Dear Esther is so far over to the side of narrative that it’s really more of an interactive story than a game. It’s this stripped-back mechanic, a game pared back to the bare bones, that lets it tell such interesting, emotional stories. Whereas other, richer franchises concentrate on stuffing ever more features into games – multiplayer modes, drop-in games, inventory systems, randomly generated levels – Dear Esther is notable for its sparse gameplay.
The music, an effective and atmospheric mixture of subtle orchestral sounds, chants and harmonies, swells as you round a darkened corner – but instead of a sharp-toothed demon you get another section of narrated story.Įsther is different from other games. There are no scary moments, but Dear Esther makes you feel like you’re always just about to come up to one. Movement is glacially slow, and you’re stripped of the abilities you’d expect in a game like this – no shooting, no collecting, no jumping, even – which heightens your feeling of vulnerability.Īt times it felt like Amnesia: The Dark Descent, which also gets its scariness from your utter helplessness, but the feeling here is of muted paranoia rather than all-out pant-shitting terror. There’s a constant sense of desperation and quiet panic, and some of the locations are both beautiful and claustrophobic. For a game (I’m going to call it a game because that’s what it most resembles, even if it isn’t actually one) in which all you do is walk around it’s incredibly atmospheric.
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