Without consciously making the decision, we were saying, “Wait, where’s that red light? We need to keep heading toward it.” The game never tells you that’s where to go. That’s what you have to do, and it never really occurred to me (or boyfriend) to do anything else. It’s there, so you head toward it, because your instinct tells you to. In the distance is the flashing red light of some kind of cell-tower type thing. You follow a path down a ridge from the island’s lighthouse. So here’s how it plays, to the best of my ability without giving anything away: That’s because it can’t, for the same reasons I outlined. It tells you nothing about the game, or what it’s about, or what it’s point is. The trailer is weird, and it’s some British guy talking in somewhat tortured metaphor as the camera pans over the scenery. I actually think it’s best experienced in a room with the lights turned off as a moving thing, and intend to play it in the dark on my next gothrough. I honestly don’t think screenshots could do it justice. It’s just animation, and it’s the quality of the entire game. We took turns saying, “Wow.” When I saw the trailer, I couldn’t quite decide if it was animation interspersed with real video or what. There were several points in my playthrough where I just stopped and looked. Phosphorescent caves, cascading waterfalls, clouds hanging low over the sea– sometimes, Boyfriend would say to me, “Wait, I just want to look,” and we’re sit and stare at the wall of the cave for a few minutes because it was incredible. It is perhaps the most intricate and beautiful art I’ve ever seen in this medium, and it’s not limited to specially-detailed cutscenes like in most games. You walk, and the story happens to you– or better, is encountered by you– and you are completely swept up in it. All you do, in the strict sense, is walk.
The game (for lack of a better term) has three controls: You can move around with the arrow keys, zoom in a little by right-clicking, or “swim up” by pressing Q. It happens to you and you’re affected by it. In Esther, the story is already written you don’t write it, you experience it. Indeed, it’s much closer to a visual novel than to any other genre, but it’s not quite that, either, because it lacks the “choose-you-own-adventure” element that define VNs. To call Dear Esther a “game” is something of a misnomer– there’s no competition or reward system you associate with a typical video game. To give insight into what happens is to disturb the delicate situation the game creates, and I don’t want to do that.
To tell you anything about it is to tell you about the story, and Dear Esther IS the story, and its beauty is in the way it builds its narrative and carries you along.
DEAR ESTHER SCARY HOW TO
I’m also not really sure how to start the review. I don’t know that I’ve ever had quite so extreme an emotional reaction to a video game. (This is what me gushing about a work I love looks like.)
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