Christopher Machell reviews Dear Esther: Landmark Edition…
Originally created in 2007 as a Half-Life 2 mod and later re-made in 2012 as a commercial release for PC, Dear Esther: Landmark Edition has been a long time coming, marking the first time console gamers can play through developer The Chinese Room’s original walking simulator. The Brighton-based developers wowed and confounded gamers in equal measure last year with Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture; now returning to their seminal work, it’s fascinating to witness in retrospect the development of Dan Pinchbeck and his team’s craft, the game itself having lost none of its haunting, mysterious qualities.
The game, newly repackaged in its ‘Landmark edition’, which includes an insightful and thoughtfully presented developer’s commentary, has been newly cleaned up and presented in crisp 1080p, running at a silky-smooth frame rate throughout. Wind blows across the island’s coarse grass and scrub, flotsam litters the beach and a mournful grime seems to cover every surface. Unsurprisingly for a four-year old game, low-res textures are noticeable on close inspection of some environmental features, but the staggeringly detailed beauty of the game’s art design and its inspired setting, a barren island in the Scottish Hebrides, easily overcomes any minor technical shortcomings. Indeed, that a small indie developer can achieve remotely this level of graphical fidelity is nothing short of astonishing. On more than one occasion the game’s visuals are simply breathtaking; the cave section in particular is beautiful, otherworldly in its layering of psychological symbolism, gurgling with beautifully rendered water and glowing with ethereal phosphorescent fungi.
Dear Esther is a story told visually, with the island’s vistas variously inspiring discomfort, desolation and awe. Complementing those vistas is Jessica Curry’s gorgeous score, a string-heavy composition of melancholy and eerie, tender beauty. The developers’ commentary, scattered in snippets around the island, reveals the unity of vision between writer and producer Pinchbeck, Curry, Robert Briscoe (art and environment design) and Ben Andrews (concept art) that is so often lacking in projects with larger teams; first and foremost, Dear Esther is a work of sheer imaginative force.
Few games inspire the imagination more so than the setting of Dear Esther, its island functioning as a metaphor for trauma, bodily disease, and a site of purgatorial redemption. Dear Esther is reluctant to give clear answers to its mysteries, requiring the player to instead fill in the gaps themselves. This ambiguity is underscored by the game’s economic, literary writing, increasingly fractured music and the uncertain identity of the player character.
While some may be frustrated by the game’s rejection of traditional play mechanics, Dear Esther remains a work of bleak, melancholic beauty. Discussions of whether it really qualifies as a ‘game’ are, frankly, moot: what matters here is its undeniable artistic and emotional depth. At 90 minutes for a typical play through, it’s brief, but the random generation of the evocative voice-over narration and visual clues – one prop in the bothy has serious emotional implications depending on whether it’s generated – encourage multiple replays as well as interpretations.
Dear Esther is not a game for everyone. Its lack of action and oblique narrative will likely turn off those who only look to games for immediate thrills or as tests of mechanical skill. But not every book has to be a James Bond novel; not every film has to be a superhero smackdown; not every game has to be Call of Duty. Developers and gamers work in an incredibly rich medium, with profound potential for artistic and emotional expression, and Dear Esther represents that potential. More importantly, however, it is a work of affecting sadness and beauty, a challenging examination of trauma that treats the player as mature, intelligent and sensitive.
Pros:
+ Gorgeous art design
+ Evocative music
+ Intelligent, literary writing
Cons:
– Some low-res textures
Rating: 10/10
Christopher Machell
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https://youtu.be/b7Ozs5mj5ao?list=PL18yMRIfoszEaHYNDTy5C-cH9Oa2gN5ng
Originally published September 20, 2016. Updated April 16, 2018.
