rating:5
When I approached this article, I was undecided on whether to attempt to tackle the key point of contention that has surrounded Dear Esther since its release on 14th February: that is, is Dear Esther *actually* a video game? As with films, books, comics and other forms of media, there are certain conventions that we believe all games have in common conventions that define the form and which video games rely on in order to be perceived as such. We assume that games must contain enemies or elements of combat - yet Portal and the upcoming release Fez have disabused us of the necessity of this. We believe that at their base level all games must have some form of in-built challenge or goal that the player must achieve but Minecraft has proven that this isn't so.
In short, both mainstream and independent games are pushing the boundaries of how we define video games and what falls under this particular label. In one way, Dear Esther is an extension of the work of these pioneering games, taking the next step in stripping away our notions of what games and gaming can be. In another, it goes all the way back to the origins of the medium, jettisoning almost every element of gameplay except the most basic text-based clues while replacing the 8-bit graphics of gaming's ancestors with gorgeously rendered landscapes that push modern game engines to the limits of their abilities. Arguments have been made on both sides, but ultimately the conclusion (if there is one) is irrelevant. While some will fall in love with Dear Esther on her own terms, accepting both her beauty and her flaws, others will reject her strangeness, her inherently alien nature being so far removed from traditional expectations as to render her boring.
If you've somehow gone this long without being told what Dear Esther is, I'm not going to spoil it for you here. It's a game best played blind, and the less you know the better. From the initial moments of exploration you feel like you're discovering both a landscape and a mode of gaming that is at once deeply familiar and disconcertingly eerie. You feel like you've played this game before, and often the visual cues echo icons of gaming, literature and cinema that have seeped into the collective memory: the out-of-place and mildly threatening props of Half Life (Dear Esther's biological father); the day-glo caves and natural interiors of Fable and any number of popular platformers; the evidence of intervention by unseen people, the sense of complete isolation and the uncanny nature of the island itself instigating the haunting sense of dread that creeps in from a lifetime of watching horror movies and overrides your rational senses when presented with the unfamiliar and the unknown. Playing the game is an experience that deftly draws on sources outside of Dear Esther's limited locations and minimal story to craft something larger than the sum of its parts something that draws you into an all-encompassing and yet deeply personal narrative, unique to each player and extraordinary in its intensity. For what it's worth, I found Dear Esther as close to perfect as a game of its kind can be. Unlike others who've viewed its success as heralding a return of the classic text-based adventure subgenre, I believe it's too niche to be able to carry a significant number of similar titles and too assured for successive games to be able to compete with it on a visual or emotional level. Instead, I hope that the way Dear Esther will have a lasting influence on the games industry is as evidence that games do not have to be constrained by expectations of medium, genre or audience. Dear Esther's incredible sales figures prove that radical, avant garde, independent, little-known titles have a genuine chance of financial and popular success, and if financiers and developers can take the game's experimental ethos as a jumping-off point for crafting their own unique, bizarre and individual takes on the medium, we will have a much richer playing field.
Dear Esther is currently available to purchase on Steam for £6.99.