Review: 'Dear Esther'

Let us be clear on one point before we begin: ‘Dear Esther’ is not a 'game' in the sense of what we commonly understand as such. A game is fundamentally an interactive form of digital media, but here the interaction required from the player is minimal. You explore the world and nothing more: you can look but not touch or engage. This is not necessarily to its detriment. Once you stop thinking of it as a ‘game’ and thinking more in terms of an immersive experience in which you are the protagonist, seeing as he sees, you begin to appreciate the beauty of the world and the simple elegance of its construction.

The immersion comes from the way in which you are essentially thrown into the narrator’s psyche. He is nameless, faceless and the only back-story you receive is through fragmented bits of monologue as and when he ‘thinks’ of things. You become drawn into this character and those whom he remembers – it’s as though you are as lost as he is, exploring this uninhabited region completely alone, re-discovering parts of your own life as they come to you. His internal monologue becomes your own after a while, which is a fairly haunting experience, particularly given the ending of the game, which I don’t wish to spoil for anyone so I won’t reveal here.

The levels of symbolism in the game (for want of a more appropriate word) are beyond what we might consider to be ‘the norm’. The island itself is a very clear metaphor with dual meaning. If we were to take a literal view of the environment, we could conclude that the isolation of the island is significant to the narrators own sense of isolation after the loss of Esther. However, the view I take is that the island is a metaphor for the narrator’s psyche itself: the barren, desolate landscapes an externalisation of his loneliness and the wrecked ships on every shore a haunting reminder of the wrecked cars of the accident which killed her.

The title character herself has no real identity of her own, as she is never physically represented on screen, and all we hear of her are fragments of information surrounding the narrator’s feelings around her death. This brings a different kind of interaction to that which we would expect in a game, since we as the audience are therefore permitted to project our own sense of loss of a loved one onto the character, creating a sense of empathy and a kind of bond with the narrator in a very personal way. She and Paul (the ‘real’ characters) and those that once inhabited the island (Donnelly and Jakobson) become more and more blurred as the game progresses; the hermits become those who he is remembering. Whilst we cannot trust entirely the narrator’s account of who said what, this has great effect in showing his mental instability and that he is struggling to come to terms with what happened, never quite reaching a point of complete understanding or acceptance.

The visuals are hauntingly beautiful. In the midst of this harsh landscape you find caves filled with waterfalls and phosphorescent fungi which add an ethereal glow to the darkness. The same phosphorescence is used in the chemical symbols and images drawn on the walls, the glow giving them a sense of significance that is difficult to place. Then, as you climb the cliff towards the end of the game, a biblical passage is revealed detailing Saul’s ride to Damascus and subsequent blinding by God, an event which leads to his spiritual enlightenment. The use of this passage provides you with the hope that, when you reach the top, you too, as the narrator, will gain some level of spiritual reconciliation with what happened. Again, I don’t wish to spoil the ending, so I will not reveal whether or not you achieve it. What I will say is that it becomes a very personal experience and that, for me at least, the ending was very emotional. In the final stage what limited control the player has is taken away from them, providing a sense of inevitability to the final scene.

As I said before, this isn’t really a 'game', but it is an example of the way in which a game-play model can be used to create an immersive artistic experience. ‘Dear Esther’ is about experiencing the story and the emotional responses to it in a personal way, and for that I admire it.