For first-time players, it’ll probably take two or three hours at most, and no matter how clever I think its design is, Dear Esther is quite linear. It’s also worth noting that this game is short. A five or ten second pause might seem short on paper, but after exploring a glorious cave system and listening to somber monologues, being hit with a black loading screen kills some of the mood. It’s a shame the developers couldn’t figure out a way to load the whole game at once or slowly buffer the next chapter as players walk. Dear Esther is comprised of four chapters that lead directly into each other, but immersion-breaking loading screens pop up between them. Only one minor setback mars this otherwise-excellent package. Dear Esther alway s resonates, and even on my third time through I felt tears forming as I trekked to its ardent monologues. Music swells as the gentleman poignantly reads his heartfelt letters aloud, and the island comes alive as gusts of wind buffet against me on a peak’s narrow path. I see the sights, I climb and descend alongside the protagonist’s highs and lows. Instead of reading black and white words on a page, I’m thrust into visible waves of the author’s emotion. Each person who plays will, literally, take different meaning and emotion from it.įor me, Dear Esther feels like a heartbreaking poem. This is partially achieved in concrete ways - physical details and certain voiceovers are actually randomized. However, as players dive deeper, the plot opens up to interpretation. On the surface, Dear Esther is about an older gentleman wandering an island’s waterside cliffs while recounting letters he’s written to his late wife. That said, despite the merits (depressing or not) that Dear Esther’s story holds, it’s also the most obtuse piece of the puzzle. I say “trudge” because this work from The Chinese Room isn’t necessarily a pleasant affair - the story and setting hang and weigh me down in a near-tangible way. Although I finished Dear Esther twice on PC prior to this reissue, I was elated to trudge through its dreary oceanside landscapes once again. The Landmark Edition features sharper visuals, updated audio and an option to play with developer commentary tracks.
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If nothing else, it helped pave the way for walking simulators in contemporary gaming.Īfter initially releasing on PC and Mac in 2012, Dear Esther is now on consoles for the first time. walking sim.Īlthough it’s hard to determine if Dear Esther was the very first of its kind (I’m sure someone will correct me in the comments section below) it certainly came before Firewatch, Gone Home, Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture, The Vanishing of Ethan Carter, The Stanley Parable and The Beginner’s Guide, just to name a few. Whether for good or ill, the game industry owes this nickname to Dear Esther, because it’s pretty much the O.G. WTF Could they have made the protagonist walk just a little faster?ĭespite the fact that the term “walking simulator” causes some people to cringe, it seems the most pertinent description for games that heavily emphasize atmosphere and storytelling while downplaying interaction, and the name stuck. LOW Abrupt loading screens break the immersion.
These were walking simulators, and they had a tradition, expectations and an audience.HIGH Exploring gorgeous phosphorescent caves. What’s clear, reading the article years later, is that by 2016 the term had taken root. Others were concerned about overly broad usage. For others, it trivialized artistic achievement. For some, “walking simulator” was a useful descriptor that allowed them to connect with a player base. The discussion reached an apex with a 2016 Kill Screen piece that interviewed critics and developers of these games about how they understood walking simulators and the discourse around them. At the time, Paste Magazine’s Austin Walker connected the motivating conversations in game design and criticism together, noting that discussions of form and content always resolved into bigger historical debates about what does and does not belong within any given culture.
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Calling something a walking simulator carried a declarative weight to it, as if the act of walking was so surface level and pointless that to call it a “game” had no value. The battle around the walking simulator term, like many definitional fights, was a political one.
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