The phrase “Walking Simulator” gets thrown around a lot when talking about games such as Dear Esther in a derogatory manor. I do think that stuff consisting of exploring an environment while the plot happens in an unconventional manner does have a place, regardless of popularity, which is an unpopular opinion.
Dear Esther was originally a first person exploration mod for Half-Life 2 in 2008 by a small group of modders called The Chinese Room. 4 years later, in 2012, the game got remade into it’s own entity on a newer version of the Source engine. For it’s final version, released in 2017. Dear Esther was ported to the Unity engine, and is called Dear Esther: Landmark Edition.
The game is told through narration as the player explores an uninhabited island, the narrator reading from a series of letter fragments to some woman named Esther, who is implied to be the the wife of the person writing the letter. The narration is randomized with each playthrough, revealing different aspect of the story each playthrough. It leaves enough open ended for the player to fill in the gaps with their own thoughts.
Dear Esther is definitely a beautiful and haunting experience. It’s atmospheric soundtrack and aesthetic giving a feeling of loneliness and sadness. And for that, Dear Esther succeeds with flying colors. Bur there isn’t much else to experience here. The entire concept of Dear Esther could have been a series of randomized clips and audio to tell the exact same story and it would have been the same experience. There aren’t any puzzles or even any interaction with anything at all.
This is the determining factor if this game is for you. Dear Esther isn’t pretending to be anything else. It could have been a more engaging experience, with more for the player to do, not necessarily with puzzles, but that would go against what the game is trying to do. And i can’t really blame it for not being something that it’s not.
The game is a love it or hate it experience. If you’re not interested in it, nothing will convince you to try and play it, and if you’re interested in it, you’ve probably already played it for yourself and enjoy conversing about it with other people who like it. But there isn’t any real depth in it beyond filling in the cracks of the story and experiencing the story slowly revealing itself to you.