Dear Esther: Landmark Edition

... or at least, that is what it feels like. The "game" takes an hour and 15 minutes to complete. I say "game", because I struggle to find enough merit in this product to actually call it a game. There are no mechanics, except for walking and looking. There are no ways to fail. There is no intelligence involved. There are no puzzles. There is a clear, linear path to follow -- once in a while, you will trigger some narrated dialogue (more on that below), but that is all that happens. The walking speed is atrociously slow. If this game had sprinting and jumping, it could be completed in less than 10 minutes. It feels very much like an amateur game, drawn out as much as possible to justify the price mark. People have praised the game as athmospheric and visually beautiful; but it is mostly comprised of bland caves and hillscapes, likely built from stock assets. As for the selling point of the game: the story. It is milquetoast at best, shallow and unspired at worst. There are tons of clichés, such as tragic car crashes and biblical references, and the whole script feels like something written by a child for a school assignment, then handed over to writer who desperately tried to insert as many fancy words as possible, to make it seem more "artsy". No hyperbole: the storytelling in this game made me cringe, and only worsened the already boring experience of walking through bland hills and caves. I find absolutely zero entertainment value in this product, and I feel thoroughly cheated out of my money, even though I bought it on sale. Let me reiterate: There is no gameplay. The story is vapid. The environments are little but stock assets cobbled together. Just because somebody put thought and time into a product, does not mean that it is worth your money. Do not buy this product; save yourself the disappointment, and watch a Let's Play on YouTube. It is exactly the same experience; albeit more entertaining, since you don't have to hold W down for 75 minutes.

It is hardly a game. What i lack is the ability to touch the things, to interact with the surroundings in any meaningful way. It is just a going and talking. I stopped listening after a while. There were no reason to do so. I lacked immersion to the game. I lack ability to go where I want to go, or just try. I know it is quite old already and one of the first of its kind, but still the adventure games of the past was much better. I still remember them.

I love Dear Esther since the first time I played. The game is perfect. Period. The game itself is a master piece. For a lot time I started to think that games are more than a "theme park", more than an obvious entertainment full of trite action. "Dear Esther" is one of that games that proved I am right. It is a imersive and poetic narrative. The mood is dark and sad. It could be a horror game, but it is not. It is more like an psychological narrative blended with ghost story elements. The soundtrack is perfect: it sets the mood perfectly and it tells the story when there is no narration. This remake improved the graffics and the soundtrack, there are some new narrative lines that weren't in the original game and the same voice actor from the original redoes his job and he does it perfectly. At least, it has some commentaries from the director and the composer that during the gameplay adds a lot the narrative and background knowledge about how the game was done. However there are a couple of things in this remake that I, personally, think that are flawed. * The caption are kind of problematic: the font is bigger than the original, I think they did this to make it easier to read, but sometimes the caption moves too quickly, so if miss a word and need to read the sentence again your're f*cked. * It p1sses me off that this remake hasn't any goodies. You may claim that goodies aren't that important, but since the original game had the ost as dlc, I expected that we could at least have the ost in this one too. * IIRC the original game supported VR better than this one,

Review based on original Steam version. I played this "game" almost 4 years ago, a few months it came out on Steam. I had heard people I knew talking about it and I thought I would take a look. I played it through a couple of times and my thoughts were, and still are, "that was kind of interesting" and "That was it?". It took me roughly 60 minutes to go from start to finish. I thought it had some cool ideas and it had some emotional response, but the randomized audio was not noticeable to me. The very slow trundle on this incredibly linear path across this rather beautiful island can be frustrating at times, especially when you deviate a little and then take ages getting back on the path. Overall I would rate it an average experience with some cool ideas. I would not call it a game, but a recent term I quite like is "First Person Experience". That term seems to fit the bill quite nicely without getting into the argument about whether "Walking Simulator" is a pejorative term or not. Would I recommend it? I think if you can get it at a discount it's worth playing through. I think that is about as highly as I can recommend it.

Beautiful locations but that's it. Very boring in my opinion. Not a single feeling or satisfaction. There is supposed to be a story in this game?