#Dear esther playthrough movie

The island, through all of this, is blameless. The other narrative runs counter to that, and it is the story of the island. The island characterized as a space of death, of isolation, and of a slow decay, but that is only for the man-made intruders on the island. One is the player character, his guilt, his mourning, and his suicide. The reason is that there are two narratives going on. I think that, in order to have real, stick-around meaning, the game world has to actually exist. I am resistant to the interpretation of the game that asserts that the whole thing is in the narrator’s mind, that the island is constructed by him, and that it is about an internal journey. The game tries to make you understand what it is like to know that there is nothing left in the world worth caring about. It is a journey through morbidly beautiful emptiness, a maudlin cocktail of sight, sound, implication and metaphor designed to conjure up a feeling of purposeful despair.Īnd I agree with this, for the most part.

It is a Lonely, Guilt-Stricken Man Simulator. I believe it is an experiment with the senses and the emotions. I do not believe Dear Esther is the search for an answer, or even for a meaning. Not that it isn’t interesting, but I don’t see it as a puzzle to be pieced together. I felt it, and we started the trudge forward.Īlec at Rock, Paper, Shotgun (a favorite site of mine) writes that Dear Esther really did “work its dark, metaphysical magic” on him, and later writes I felt deeply complicit in both the guilt that the narrator felt and also in his slow suicide–as soon as I saw the beacon, I knew what would happen. The death of Esther is a blow to his very being, and it (apparently) shatters his mind. The symbolism is heavy handed, the writing purple at times, but the combination of those things with the stunning visuals is really just an effort to make the player understand the emotions that Donnely is feeling. There is nothing else that the game is concerned with. Dear Esther is a game about making the player feel.

#Dear esther playthrough movie

In the same way that a movie or a book plods, inch after inch, to resolution, Dear Esther has a clear end point, literally visible in the first moments of the game, and the player is taken there without deviation.ģ. The player isn’t able to interact with the world through the player character, the entire story is told through disembodied narration, and there is only one goal–the end of the game. It uses the infrastructure and rhetorical devices of a video game to tell a crippling, affective story, but it doesn’t have any of the hallmarks of a traditional game. He reaches it, he jumps off, the game the world fades to black.Ģ. Donnelly, an infection from a broken leg spreading through his body, isolated from the rest of the world, makes his way across the island to a giant aerial tower. Jacobson died on the island a hundred years before, a victim to syphilis, and his infection drove him to mania. Along with this, Donnelly is fixated on a man named Jacobson, a man who wrote the original history of the island. Before the game, Donnelly has done a number of strange things: burning all of his belongings, painting religious quotes and scientific diagrams all over the island, and throwing all of his letters to Esther into the ocean.

The lines between reality and hallucination begin to blur for him–drugs could be involved.

Donnelly, sometime after this, goes to an island that has particular meaning for him and his wife. His wife, Esther, was killed in a car accident. I have only played it through one time, though I plan on doing it more, and this is the story as I understood it. That means that you get snippets from each story, and it really makes each playthrough of the game different. There are three scripts, and at each moment where the narrator speaks, the game picks from one of those scripts and delivers some text from it. Check it out.)Īs faithful readers will know, I posted a transcript of the Dear Esther trailer and some thoughts about it a while back. I bought the game on release, and I just finished it a few minutes ago, so I thought that I would write about the game immediately.ġ. I have made another post about this game, and I basically changed everything I thought in point #1 below. THERE ARE SPOILERS FOR DEAR ESTHER IN THIS POST.