Dear Esther Review

Remaking the remake

I bought this one on Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/520720/Dear_Esther_Landmark_Edition/

Official webpage: http://www.thechineseroom.co.uk/games/dear-esther/

Soundtrack: https://jessicacurry.bandcamp.com/album/dear-esther

There are two games that made me rethink everything I thought about videogames: Shadow of the Colossus, by Fumito Ueda, and Rule of Rose, by Shuji Ishikawa. Before them, I used to thought about game as if they were like a rollercoaster: just a little time of meaningless fun. I would just turn on the computer, beat the levels, skip the cut-scenes, curse the difficult levels, feel rewarded for beat the boss, enjoy the ending and that'all folks!

After these games, I started to thought them as work of art, just like novels, poetry, films, paintings, theater pieces, and so on. And since I stopped to think of games as if they were theme parks, I started to demand the same high level of quality I look for on in other media. And this is the story about how I would know about the duo Tale of Tales and, soon after, this nice piece of art by Robert Briscoe.

That time I would think that the avarage gamer wouldn't like games like this one, since they are too addicted to a kind of action that only serves to divert the atention from the dullness of the story. I wouldn't think that the avarage gamer would be interessed for a slow paced game that the only thing we do is walk around exploring a desert island as we heard a story. I was wrong. Dear Esther was a sale success. I think the reason it was so well received by the gamers is not only because Dear Esther was groundbreaking for use a minimalist gameplay: there were other games that made this before and they haven't the same success on sales; I also don't believe the reason is that this game showed to the world that games could have a serious, meaningful, thoughtfull, contemplative story. I think that there are other games that made the same before.

In my humble opinion, the bigest reason is that this game was kind of made with the "gamer community".

It started as a mod to Half Life 2. Dear Esther stood out right there and people from The Chinese Room received great feedback from the community. The gamer community accept Dear Esther when it was still freeware, and it was a great success when the game was remade for comercial release. Some years later The Chinese Room had to stop to sell the game, for legal reasons regard the engine. Because of this, Robert Briscoe decided to remade the game using Unity engine and rerelease it updating all the audio visuals aspects. O graphic art is more beautiful, all the soundtrack was re-recorded and the original voice actor re-recorded his old lines and recorded new ones.

Dear Esther success also showed me how much I was wrong about what I believed to be the "avarage gamer". The idea that only few intellectually and emotionally blessed people were capable to appreciate a experimental game was gone. And yes: I was that pretentious. Now I understand that every game is for everybody. I know that every person has its personal preference, of course, and I need to respect that, but now I understand that every single person is able to appreciate a great piece of art even if it is outside the common place.

PROS

• Storytelling. This game is all about storytelling, if it sucked, there was nothing to save it, no matter how good everything else were. The story is dark and dense. It has its reminiscence on the ghost stories, but it isn't a horror game. Since the story is semi random, every single person who play it will have a different experience.
• Poetic funtion. I believe that there are just few games that has such a good linguistic work that causes the same defamiliarization (as coined by Viktor Shklovsky) we usually find in poetry. Dear Esther works so well with the poetic funtion of language (Roman Jakobson). The way the story is told makes the gamer/listener aware to the its own aesthetics. It has rhythm, it has a good sonority. It is perfect.
• Soundtrack. For a moment I won't talk about Dear Esther. I'll talk about the soundtrack industry. I feel that games and movies are suffering in this area. We barelly can remember a tune from new movies or a games. There are a few that pieces that hightlights but, in general, I think that despite most soundtracks are create very well the mood the game/movie needs, they lack indentity. Dear Esther is different. Fortunately. The soundtrack not only makes the game more immersive, but it also helps the storytelling. It has memorables tunes, but it also let the player breath. Jessica Curry knew exactly how to work not only the music, but also the silence. Just like the story, the music is full of metaphors. For exemple: in comparison to the rest of the game, inside the cave there is almost no narrative and it is the only moment we heard a feminine voice. It feels like Esther herself speaks to us as the main character immerse even more inside himselves.
• Graphic artwork. The visual work is simply awesome. I loved it on the first commercial release, I love it more on Landmark Edition. The landscape is beautiful and rotten at the same time. It is as beautiful and rotten as the main character's soul.
• Gameplay. In most of the games, I would say how the controls are or are not responsive, however it does not apply in this game. I think the gameplay hightlight is its minimalism. To walk and to explore, that's all you'll do, but, just like Everyday The Same Dream, the minimalism force the player to explore every single detail from the game, hightlighting the story.
• Director's commentary. This is something that came with the Landmark Edition. This was an excellent idea to the developers tell how the game was done and how they interpret their own work.

CONS

• Localization. It is actually well localizated. It has subtitles in five languages, but since this game is mostly made of storytelling, I think it could have more. Ok, I confess, I'am being biased. It lacks Portuguese. I mean, try to see it my way: even if you are fluent in a foreing language it is hard to understand metaphors if you're not native. Try to watch a comedy show in another language, it isn't as funnier as it is to a native. I really think that Dear Esther should be translated to Portuguese, and even more languages. From Romanian to Japanese. Why not?

STORY ANALYSIS

The story takes over in one of the Hebrides islands. There are three or more layers of story. This layers intertwine themselves to stir emotions and confuse the player. I'm going to name this layers as:

The past perfect tense: this layer tell the life of two shepherds, Donnelly, who wrote in his journals the story of the second shepherd, Jakobson, who had lived in this island centuries before and had come to this island hoping to make a family. Both shepherds had painful deaths: Donnely died as insane as syphiles can turn a man to; Jakobson got a sickness from one of his sheeps and falled in one of these big holes this Island has, he injured himself riping off his nails as he tried to climb back to the surface. He was found frozen inside a cave, months after is death.

The past simple tense: this layers is about the accident that killed Esther, the narrator's wife.

The present tense: maybe it is real, may it is just a metaphor, maybe it is metaphysical. This is the time and place that we explore the island. It is uninhabited, but it does have vestiges of civilization. We can find the houses these men had lived in ancient times, a lighthouse, buoys at the sea. We also can find some marks that were apparently made by the narrator, words writeen on the walls, an armada made of paper boats and lighted candles.

However, some of the vestiges, in my opinion, reveal that this island is some kind of metaphor, a place build from hallucinations from the narrator, who is agonizing in his own death. Or maybe this island is metaphysical, some kind of purgatory where it has to suffer, at last, free from its guilt and sins, might fly in peace. Anyway, the narrator needs to enter inside his own mind, inside his memories to find some peace. There are some objects that evokes Esther's death and are incompatible with the environment. Tires, destroyed cars, bloody medical tools, a ultrasound print that probably indicates that Esther was preagnant when she died.

The candles we find through the acts three and four are another evidence that this island does not exist for real, being some made up from some kind of a hallucination. How can these candles stay lit in such a windy day? How can they stay lit inside a damp cave? And speaking of the cave, how can it be so illuminated without any hole that could let the sunshine in?

I think that the narrator was on this island in some moment in his past life, but by the time we're playing it was created by his mind. Maybe, as the narrator sugests, in the moment of the car crash that took Esther life. Or maybe, he is in that island, but unconscious or in coma because the infection in his broken leg. His infection is the same that rots both the island and his soul. Now, passed out and close to die, the narrator walks again through the same island he walked before, now full of objects that are unrelated to the islando but evoke his wife and the accident.

Anyway, quoting the cartoonist André Dahmer, I believe that the mind is the island and the body is the harbor. Lost inside his own mind, unable to get in touch to anything and anyone outside, the narrator needs to look inside his memories and get over his wife death. The moment he gets deep into the island, he also gets deep inside himself and there he hears his lover's voice singing as if she was a breeze that goes through the cave and shows the way to clean air. His desire for Esther, his desire to see her again and decipher her death turns into an obsession and we start to follow his mental breakdown.

The narrator seems to go through the five stages of Death, as postulated by Elisabth Kübler-Ross, even if these stages are not explicitly shown. I have the feeling that the narrator has already hallucinated many times before and now, the moment we follow his strugles, we can see his last walk to the highest point of the tower where he will accept his fatal destiny and will jump from the tower to fly through the air the same way the seagulls. In his last telling, the characters are mixed when the full names of Esther and Paul are revealed: Esther Donnely and Paul Jakobson. Now I wonder: do the shepherds really exist, or maybe they are just imaginary representations of the Esther and Paul's personas?

In the end of the day, it doesn't matter. All my interpretation and analysis can be converted to nothing. It is nothing more than dust in the wind. This analysis I just made it from the last time I played, but, the countless game features, the story is semi-random and therefore any person who play this will have a different experience each they he or she play.

FINAL THOUGHTS

I don't think I have much more to speak of. I believe I said everything I needed. It is slow paced. The environment is lonely and dreary. The story telling is uneven. The soundtrakc, in my opinion, only compares to the games made by Tale of Tales (which you can write a bunch academic works about their soundtracks).

Dear Esther is a masterpiece.

It could be locked inside the museums and art galleries, but it is in the clouds ready to fly, to land and be loaded in any computer. It is ready to be appreciated by everyone.