![]() ![]() ![]() – An uncompromisingly inventive game delivered to the highest AAA standards. – Stunning soundtrack composed by Jessica Curry, featuring world-class musicians. – A poetic, semi-randomised story like you’ve never experienced in a game before. – Explore incredible environments that fully immerse you in the haunting island and its past. – Every play-through a unique experience, with randomly generated audio, visuals and events. As you step forwards, a voice begins to read fragments of a letter: ‘Dear Esther…’ – and so begins a journey through one of the most original first-person games of recent years.Ībandoning traditional gameplay for a pure story-driven experience, Dear Esther fuses its beautiful environments with a breath-taking soundtrack to tell a powerful story of love, loss, guilt and redemption.ĭear Esther: Landmark Edition has been remade with the Unity engine, featuring a full audio remaster, and the addition of a brand-new Directors’ Commentary mode, allowing players to explore the island and learn what inspired the game and how it was crafted by The Chinese Room and Rob Briscoe. ![]() ‘Dear Esther immerses you in a stunningly realised world, a remote and desolate island somewhere in the Outer Hebrides. But I have to repeat this isn’t for everyone.‘A deserted island… a lost man… memories of a fatal crash… a book written by a dying explorer. I have only the recommendation for those of you interested in a fundamentally different approach to gaming, or loves reading, art or all those other hipster things, give it a shot. The first I have ever awarded here in my stint at DD.net which should say something. This game deserves to win all the awards it is nominated for, if only because it shows us the box we’re all thinking in and simply tosses it out of a highrise. This is perhaps the most different game DD.net has reviewed, and I’m glad to have been the one to do it. I will be there myself and I’m keen for some different explanations! Share your interpretation on it in the forums. Replaying the game has only provided me with more information, as it gives different spiels every time you play it, and I’m still deliciously vague on some details. And since the game is nothing but style and human insight, this review is going to be a bit short. Unfortunately, I cannot ruin the story for you, nor can I allow myself to taint your interpretation with mine, so I’m afraid I can’t tell you the plot. Granted, this glued-to-your-seat experience only lasts for about an hour and a half if you take your time, (which you should) but what an enthralling hour and a half. The HL2 engine was surely created by gods.) (Achieved with so little processing power too. With movies, plays and visual arts not being high up the immersive scale compared to novels (justification here being that you can sit and read a book for hours then wondering as you finally look up is the sun rising or setting? Films do not afford this), Dear Esther takes a novel, ties it up in a painting and pushes it into a movie, all with you in the driver’s seat. The reward here is exploiting the immersiveness that gaming provides. So if you’re after a run-n-jump shooter or something generally traditional I’d refer you to almost any other page on DD.net, but if you are a fan of the kind of movies like Donny Darko, you are going to adore this ‘game’. If this sounds terribly pretentious to you, then it’s because it is a bit. ![]() Dear Esther is all at once an oil painting, a poem and a memoir all rolled into one wonderful medium. This is a new sort of interactive fiction. As you explore the island, looking for clues or hints about the meaning of this whole situation, the voiceover of a British man speaks intermittently between locations and specific objects giving you 95 per cent of all your information. Seeing nothing obvious for you to do in the game, the most logical step is to walk, and walking is what you will be doing for the whole of Dear Esther. In Dear Esther we find not only this elusive title of which we speak, but we may also be finding a completely different media experience never seen before now.īefore I get all philosophy-like and excited as a dedicated English nerd about this game, I need to tell you about what it is.ĭear Esther starts with you on a dock with no idea who, where or even when you are. Even rarer, you gleefully abandon the well-worn path of gaming and race into the scrub after it, chasing down its validity as a piece of artistic expression. Rarely you come across a title that departs from the videogame convention so dramatically that you start to question its status as a game. TITLE: Dear Esther: Landmark Edition GENRE: Adventure, Casual, Indie DEVELOPER: The Chinese Room, Robert Briscoe PUBLISHER: Secret Mode RELEASE DATE: 'A. ![]()
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