'A deserted island... a lost man... memories of a fatal crash... a book written by a dying explorer.'
Dear Esther immerses you in a stunningly realised world, a remote and desolate island somewhere in the Outer Hebrides. As you step forwards, a voice begins to read fragments of a letter: 'Dear Esth...
'A deserted island... a lost man... memories of a fatal crash... a book written by a dying explorer.'
Dear Esther immerses you in a stunningly realised world, a remote and desolate island somewhere in the Outer Hebrides. 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.
Abandoning 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.
Dear 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.
Every play-through a unique experience, with randomly generated audio, visuals and events.
Explore incredible environments that fully immerse you in the haunting island and its past.
A poetic, semi-randomised story like you've never experienced in a game before.
Stunning soundtrack composed by Jessica Curry, featuring world-class musicians.
An uncompromisingly inventive game delivered to the highest AAA standards.
Take this as a warning: you need to be the right person to enjoy this. It isn't a "game" per say, as you don't have objectives to accomplish. It is, however, a marvelous story and incredibly intriguing. The music is stupendous, the narration flawless, the writing superb, and the atmosphere hits all the right notes. It was an engrossing, fascinating, wonderful experience from start to finish. I still occasionally run through it, just to enjoy the setting. If you like visual novels, or you like narrative experiences, you will very much enjoy this game.
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.
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