![]() ![]() Music is often absent, leaving you to listen to the wind and crashing waves, but fades in and out with exquisite timing to emphasise moments of narrative significance. Oblique graffiti starts to appear on cliff faces and cave walls as time wears on, and it maintains a sense of mystery right through to its conclusion. You are led, without ever really feeling like you are being led, by subtle visual cues that stand out against the landscape and draw you towards them – a low-hanging moon, a slowly blinking communication tower, or the yawning mouth of a cave. You walk from lonely, rocky beaches up wind-stripped hillside slopes, through richly detailed underground caves and through the skeletons of long-decayed ships. Play You don't actually do anything except guide the invisible protagonist around the island, taking in the natural beauty of the coast and the startling luminescence of the underground caves. Later on, his commentary becomes stranger and more impassioned. In the first chapter, the narrator talks mostly in beautifully phrased snippets of information about the history of the island. The writing is unashamedly florid, flitting all the time in an unsettling way between past and present, and usually addressed to the eponymous Esther, whose identity becomes clear as time goes on. Dear Esther is the story of a shipwrecked castaway on a remote Hebridean island, delivered through spoken lines of sumptuous, disconnected prose as you walk around the detailed landscape. If you're at all interested in exploring what games can do outside of the traditional genre templates, Dear Esther offers an unforgettable two hours that will leave you feeling edified, contemplative, and possibly even emotionally moved. Those who aren't, though, will be pleased to know that the atmosphere of the world and the incredible graphical detail do more than enough to justify the game as a commercial release. I came to Dear Esther fresh I read the discussion around the original mod with interest, but never actually played it, and I'm guessing that many potential purchasers will be in the same boat.
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