Dear Esther is a game that boils interactivity down to the most simplistic thing possible: movement. As a game about movement, and finding ways to make the player move forward, it's an interesting example of how to drive a player without anything more than presenting new things for them to look at. There's miniature paths that offer glimpses at future areas, glinting lights and figures in the distance to draw the eye, and in one particular section, the level itself becomes motivation enough to continue and to see more of the inspired visual design. Unfortunately, the story is almost irrelevant to the game. It's an interesting choice to present it in a randomized, non-linear fashion, but it ends up providing at its most interesting a bit of context for what's going on. At other points, it says things that just sound very nice and meaningful to hear, but melt off your mind after a few minutes. After playing this game, I came away feeling like The Chinese Room should contract themselves out for level design in games. They got me to walk through all of Dear Esther on the strength of its presentation alone, and there's plenty of games that I get bored with despite having actual gameplay.
Divinity 2 feels like a much older RPG somehow brought through a time-warp into the present. Most of the time, this works out fantastically. The game's writing, the sense of exploration, the design of the quests and the world, the soundtrack, all of it is fantastic. The graphics for the most part are beautiful and just slightly stylized, making it look like a pulp fantasy illustration barring a few issues. The combat works, but it's hard to say it's fantastic. If you're a person who likes exploring or humor, you're probably going to enjoy this game quite a bit. Poking around everywhere will let you find stuff you never even knew was there in the first place. And, impressively, sometimes the game challenges you with something that isn't even combat. You'll find platforming sections, or riddles, or impromptu memory tests. The writing is both gently sarcastic and refreshingly sincere; it believes in the insane fantasy world that it's set in, but it's not afraid to poke jokes. Try to find one conversation where you can't make a snarky comeback. The gameplay is a mixed bag. The system of stats and skills works very well (essentially freeform, allowing you to take whatever skills you like) and the loot taps into your inner DPS-calculating nerd. The combat is quick and you can be pretty acrobatic with leaping strikes and backflips, but it can boil down into a clickfest while you chug potions. It does know how to get challenging enough to keep you on your toes, though. If you don't have a high tolerance for hack and slash combat, try the demo first. The story itself is nothing all too special--it's done well enough, but there's nothing that sets it apart all that much, even though it's got enough good ideas in there to keep you going for the most part. The graphics are beautifully stylized, but in some places the seams start to show a little, like how distant mountains don't blend into the sky properly. If you've got a good PC and you're struggling with framerate issues, you should turn on the 'shadow frameslice update' option; it makes environmental shadows update more slowly, but saves a lot of performance. And if you're having trouble with sharp aliasing on high settings and can't force AA through your graphics card control panel, try turning on FXAA if your drivers have it, or getting the SMAA injector. (Just search Google for it.) Either of those helps the aliasing considerably. So in the end, even though I love this game dearly, I have to admit it's not exactly perfect. But if you don't mind looking past a few blemishes, Divinity 2 is an astoundingly rewarding game that can easily suck up fifty hours of your life. And you'll only have finished about half of the content there is. I'm speaking from experience there.
