![]() When you’re making a game such as this, your visuals need to be of a very high standard. You can’t die in Dear Esther, there’s a nice trippy cut scene that happens if you wander into the sea or fall off a cliff before you’re placed back where you previously were. Later we find more divisive clues to the conclusion of the story, and there are moments in the design where different objects will appear randomly, giving you different interpretations to the events. We know there is a missing lover and something has happened to their relationship. You have to draw together the clues and find some of the answers in the gaps. It gives hints of a narrative, but doesn’t just fill it with exposition. The voice-over is poetic, fragmented and dreamy. Down a gully, books lay strewn impossibly on the rocky floor, candles are lit across the beach, but no one is around and painted mathematical signs fill the cave walls in glowing neon colors. It’s a place that isn’t quite real and things aren’t what they seem. The writing and design of the narrative is unearthly in its concept. Now the story is the key here and this is where it gets interesting. As you journey the landscape, the game reveals its clues and mysteries that are both complicated and emotionally powerful. You play as a man who walks around the island like a lost soul, trying to collect fragments of his story told through voice-over, images and sound. The game is an explorative, dreamlike mystery set on a Hibernian island. It started out as a Half Life 2 mod in 2008, and eventually got turned into the successful version we have with us today. Made by the award winning team, The Chinese Room, who scored a huge hit with last years Everyone’s Gone to Rapture, this is the console version of the first game they produced for PC and Mac in 2012. Dear Esther is now another one for my compendium of game art. I own games like Inside, that I will never ever get rid of, or trade in, or swap, because I have it as part of my art collection. I think a piece of art is something that speaks to you personally and makes you experience something, or feel something that is hard to put into words. Can a game be a piece of art? This debate has raged hard for the last decade or so and I think the answer is a defining yes.
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