When I first played Dear Esther, a long time ago, I was inexperienced and young. I condemned the game because I thought the concept was stupid, and that it waxed lyrical around vague nonsense statements designed to sound deeper than it was. Since then, I've played many more "walking sims" as the genre Dear Esther created is called, I've experienced a lot more storytelling - nuanced, vague, implied - and i've grown as a person. I thought that now was a good time to re-visit this game, to see if after all this time I was too harsh on Dear Esther, to see if that ultimately I was just deriding it for being different instead of being bad.
I was, ultimately, proven to be right all along.
Dear Esther is a story based game that has no concrete story. What do I mean? I mean that the game is intentionally vague, empty, non-conclusive and nebulous by design. It doesn't *want* to tell you what's going on, it wants you to "fill in the blanks", to "create your own interpretation". Here's mine: Dear Esther is a pretentious, slow game that wants you to think it's more than what it is. The Plot? Your (presumably) SO died, was also pregnant, because of a car crash and you got depressed and kill yourself. That's the entire game. Everything else, every other piece of the game, is trying to sell it as more than that - but it isn't.
"Ooh but the island is a metaphor!", "look at the fancy, poetic language!", "but what about the symbolism?" - All of these things, these concepts, questions and ideas fronted by the game are done in what I believe was the sincere intent of the developers to present you with ambiguity and depth, but it's not real. The depth is a picture of a deep hole stretched over a flat plane, encouraging you as the "player" to jump into it to experience how far down you fall. I like poetic language, but the language here isn't exposatory or illusory, it's not illustrative, it's just "woah this is a metaphor, this reminds me of this one guy. My wife is dead". It's fluff, it's dialogue with nothing to say padded out to sound like more than what it is. The developer commentary goes on about how the dialogue and even the title are "words that are supposed to sound beautiful", but that has to be one of the single most up-your-own-arse ideas i've ever heard, because it's entirely a nothing-burger of a philosophy. Dialogue is the story communicating directly, and when you *HAVE* no direct story and you're all just writing allegories, implications and vague statements, the dialogue has nothing to say except vague illusions to what the game *might* be trying to say, as if the very concept of trying to write poetic prose means you have to write near-meaningless nonsense.
"Oh this section is about rebirth because of the cave!" Oh? You mean the part followed up by the character commiting suicide? What kind of a dumb message and placement is that? Rebirth? Resurrection? Is it supposed to be some vague religious allegory from a writer who is a self-described atheist? No, let me be clear here, Dear Esther is not some groundbreaking masterpiece - some finely tuned story game that is deep and meaningful, whose words and text are combined together to create something special - it's an illusion. The developers genuinely believe that this is some kind of ground-breaking, masterpiece, game-of-the-year title and you can tell that by how they pat themselves on the back over their work and how "oh look at how we inspired the caves in this entirely unrelated game from developers who never even "played" our game!" it gets, but the only conclusion I can draw from that is that they're *so* pretentious and faux-philisophical that they genuinely believe they've composed art instead of a flat JPEG expanded over too much screen space.
Art is subjective, and some people like this "game". Let me be clear in saying that there is no harm in liking this game, nor in "playing" it - everyone can come away with different lessons and understandings from media, and Dear Esther is no exception. But, as I see it, as "my personal version of the story" reads, it's quite simple - Dear Esther is still the same cliche'd, meaningless drivel that it was all those years ago. It's not about someone's "descent into grief and acceptance", it's someone *saying* how say they are, how injured they are, how they're having to take medication and how their leg is broken, but doing nothing in game to connect that to the actual reality the player is supposed to experience. It's all tell and no show, all flash and no fire - visuals without real meaning stitched together with words that are empty, because they are *intentionally* vague and meaningless. There are so, so many better games out there that actually deliver story in an interactive medium in a way that engages the player, so many other "walking sims" that actually relate the character to the story, to make it feel as if you're a part of events instead of some kind of disembodied, avatar-less prescence.
Dear Esther is a game with no gameplay, has a story with no plot, where the only symbolism and metaphor you actually get presented with is a front designed to sound like something that means something, because there's intentionally nothing concrete going on. All you get is nebulous statements, vague half-ideas and disconnected walking at a snail's pace, while you wait for something - anything - that might make you feel like you're part of events instead of just watching them happening while pressing the forward button. Dear Esther may be the first, and I'm glad it wasn't the last, but by every metric I use to judge a game and it's impetus, it fails completely.
