Dear Esther

     Dear Esther (2012) is a video game developed by Dan Pinchbeck for the Chinese Room an independent production company. The game does not follow the traditional conventions of a video game, because it imposes a minimum interaction of the player and does not require many decisions to be made or tasks to be accomplished. Instead, the focus is put on the story line which is narrated by an epistolary narrator. It is a piece of interactive visual storytelling.

      Dear Esther offers two hours that will leave you feeling edified, contemplative, and possibly even emotionally moved. It is a story of a shipwrecked castaway on a Hebridean island, delivered through spoken lines of sumptuous, disconnected prose as you walk around detailed landscape. The text written in the game is florid, flitting all the time in an unsettling way between past and present. At the beginning of the game, the narrator will talk about the history of the island. Later on his commentary becomes stranger and more impassioned. The mystery the story poses is supported by the picturesque landscape which becomes increasingly gloomy through the setting sun. The subtle music adds an uncanny feeling to the journey over the island.

     The aspect of immersion in Dear Esther differs from experiences of reading a linear narration as well as from the experience of playing other video games. As a player your focus is shifted to reading instead of experiencing the story line of the game by being a deciding factor of the action. The experience becomes a much more passive one than in role play- or hit and run games. As a reader the experience is altered through the games visibility. Instead of creating the image in his head the reader is presented with the world he immerse to.

     Four years after its original publication, Dear Esther is still an ongoing project. To find out more about the original game as well as updated versions follow this link.

  M. Hamouda & S. Plum