Dear Esther: Landmark Edition

I’m going to dive straight into this one. Dear Esther was another one of those ‘recommended’ games that I got via my wish list because it was on sale. The result of my one evening playthrough was that going to sleep would have been a more productive use of my time.

I may have cocked up and missed the point of the story by playing it wrong as my first playthrough of the game was done with director commentary on instead of the in-game dialogue. This immediately reminded me of Gone Home and all the nasty words I put in my review for that one. Now, the director commentary for Dear Esther was nowhere near the level of pretentious, arrogant, garbage that came from the creators of Gone Home but I still find it massively pretentious to have a director commentary for a game in any case.

Some of the commentary talks about the genre of walking simulator as a genre of ‘game’ and this appears to go back to the whole ‘games as art’ argument, something I’ve yet to address with any real vigour in the gaming community. In order to give it some real thought, I started by looking up the definition of a game. The closest one, and the one that references computer games, is ‘an activity that one engages in for amusement.’ This is interesting in itself because Dear Esther is a walking simulator where walking would be your activity. However I do not believe at any point did it either ‘engage’ or ‘amuse’ me but I’m also not one for going to an art gallery to stare at pieces of ‘art’ (damn, that’s a lot of quotations.) So I guess what I’m trying to say is it’s entirely subjective whether Dear Esther, or other games of its ilk, are considered games.

To me, it’s a not a game and it felt more like work. As a direct comparison, Gone Home was shit but at least there was something to do with a feasible and tangible end destination. Dear Esther has you walking towards a radio mast so you can jump off it and turn into a bird and at the end, it leaves you asking the question; what was that about? It’s a good job the director commentary was there to tell me… but they didn’t really know either.

And it’s this kind of shit that pisses me off massively about creative licence. If you have no real idea where your story is going – leaving it up to other’s interpretation is just fucking lazy. It’s like turning up to a play and having the actors expect the audience to make up their lines for them. I’m all for creative interpretation but at least have an idea of what you want that interpretation to be and then be surprised and amazed when people come up with something different.

I’ll confess to not being an artist in the traditional sense where I figure out what I want convey through media and what it represents. I am very much more, here is a story – it has a beginning, middle and end - and something actually happens in the middle.

That was problem with Dear Esther – I didn’t understand why it had started, I didn’t know where it was going and I didn’t get the ending. Others will pretend they did but if they watched the director commentary, they are only lying to themselves.

None of this takes away from the effort that has gone in to making games and while I can easily sit here and write a thousand-word review about why I didn’t like it that shouldn’t take away from the effort that goes into making it – even if the person who composed the score for the game pretty much says they only used one score that she has already written because she wasn’t being paid.

In terms of the actual game though, a lot of effort has gone in to making it (my above comment is very tongue in cheek and reading around what was said in the director commentary.) Every playthrough is different and this is something I wouldn’t have noticed if the achievements didn’t require me to play the game twice. Each playthough will reveal something different about the story and while this is clever, it will in no way encourage the masses to get the full experience of the game as most people will get to the end once and say they’ve completed it and not play it again.

Another reason why people may not want to do additional playthoughs is because the pace is ridiculously slow with no speed-up option. Your protagonist walks at 2 mph and the director commentary tells you this was deliberate. The only reason I can think of for this is that if you are playing the game and find a way to run, you may trigger the next voice over bit while you are in the middle of the previous one. And we can’t have that can we, even if you’ve heard it before. It’s the same as having unskippable cutscenes on games that require multiple playthoughs.

The music is fitting but because of my lack of engagement, it was just depressing. And as interesting as a lot of the scenery was, due to the lack of interaction the protagonist has with it, this also failed to capture my interest.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 10 Achievements

Of the ten achievements, four can be earned by playing through the main story which is one for each chapter. There are also collectible urns in each chapter and if you find them all there’s another achievement for that.

There are also achievements for ‘dying’ by drowning and falling off a cliff although you don’t really die in the true sense of the word. You also need to go off the beaten path to find all of the voice over bits in the main story and do this again with director commentary on to find all of the director commentary nodes. This is easier than the main story voice overs as they are clearly marked on the map by bright orange thingies.

Before you complete both playthroughs, you will get the achievement for taking 5,000 steps and that’s your lot for Dear Esther.

Downloadable Content – N/A

As you can probably tell, I did not enjoy the experience that was Dear Esther (this time I have deliberately not called it a game).

It’s worth pointing out that I have vented my opinion in this review quite aggressively and I will say again, just because I didn’t like something does not mean that I don’t appreciate the hard work that went into or that I don’t get it. I certainly do get it and there is a heart wrenching story here that will have an impact on some people. I am just not one of those people.

I like to consider games, films and the like as my escape from reality and I like to dive into the amazing and imaginative worlds that other people create. These ‘real life story’ games don’t do that for me. Far from it and it’s probably high time I started being a bit more choosy with my games and ignoring critical reviews.

Dear Esther is another easy and quick completion though. Despite the pace of the protagonist, I managed to get through both playthroughs in less than three hours.