Traditional level design is such that we tend to look upon gameworlds with blinkers, filtering out everything that signifies neither objective nor threat.
#DEAR ESTHER ACHIEVEMENT GUIDE FULL#
Even if you approach Dear Esther with a full understanding of its mission and context, the opening is still terribly disorientating, and it’s not exaggerating to liken it to falling through the looking glass into perhaps the most immersive game ever made.īecause there are neither interactive elements nor threats, you start taking in your surroundings in a way that you would if you were actually on the island. The controls – WASD and mouse to look – seem normal, so it takes you a few minutes to realise that the shed contains neither key, pistol or crowbar, and that your well-honed gamer’s instincts to search, loot and destroy are useless here. Ahead of you stands a shed, with the door open. The game begins on a grimy concrete jetty, beneath a lighthouse.
You, an unspecified person or entity, wander the island as the narrator reads disjoined and achronological letters to his late wife. No, it’s more a scenario: a woman is killed by a drunk-driver, and her bereaved husband retreats to a Hebridean Island to find closure. While all these viewpoints are valid, doubly so when you consider that Dear Esther was partly crafted to spark debate (for more on the game’s unique background, read our interview with Dan Pichbeck or head for the official site), they can fail to address a fairly basic question that a reader may reasonably expect to see answered ina review: is Dear Esther any good? Can a three-hour walk through a static gameworld deliver an experience that’s worth having, or is it merely an exercise in intellectual masturbation?ĭespite starting life as an exploration of the narrative potential of games, Dear Esther doesn’t really have a story. Others conclude that it’s a game because it isn’t anything else, and many believe that it somehow elevates gaming by railing against the confines of the medium Some feel that its lack of objectives and interactivity prevent it from being a true “game”. Many reviews of Dear Esther, the narrative experiment borne of a Half Life 2 mod, have sought to define what it is, and they have drawn a variety of conclusions.