Dear Dear Esther...

Early this week, a friend turned me on to a highly-praised Half-Life 2 mod called Dear Esther noted for its unconventional use of an interactive medium strictly to tell a story. This very much piqued my interest because some friends and I have been discussing doing this very sort of thing in our spare time, and were looking for inspiration.

From what I read on the mod before being able to install it, Dear Esther is an "interactive ghost story" using the Source engine as a vessel of delivery. Based on this description and the various quotes of praise associated with the game, I was about to experience a revelation regarding storytelling in games.

To spoil the end of my own post, I was sincerely moved by Dear Esther, mostly in ways I can't explain. There doesn't seem to be any way to describe my experience and reaction to it in a way that could convince anyone to want to play it.. Indeed I think most people would think they'd just wasted 15-30mins of their time if they played Dear Esther. However, it's been 3 days since my run through and I can't seem to stop thinking about it.

Anyway ...

There are plenty of other websites that describe the "story" and "gameplay" of Dear Esther, so I'll leave that to them. As far as what drew me to the game in the first place, I'm not sure that expectation was met. I was hoping to see an interesting example of good storytelling purely by interacting and exploring a game environment. But what I got were several fragments of well-performed and scored narrations of a vague, incoherent story I could only hear each piece of after being forced to slowly walk through a thoroughly uninteresting and poorly-designed landscape between each one. And that's about it.

I feel the need to clarify: I was completely immersed in the thematic elements of Dear Esther. As soon as the very first notes of the score began, and the narrator made his first monologue, I was hooked. Despair, isolation, mystery, and even fear all had their turns during the ~half-hour I spent wandering the island. What disappointed me was the feeling that all of the opportunities to make the most out of it being an "interactive experience" were completely wasted in an artificially-padded "journey" with only one outcome and zero interaction. I don't mean that the mostly-linear path through the island is bad or ineffective because it's linear, but that the story wouldn't be any less vague by knowing more of it. Regardless of how many clips you hear, you never get more than a pale reverie from a man admittedly delusional from painkillers and probably madness.

If there was any need to require the player to interact ... some "reward" for exploring all the nooks and crannies of the island, then I would not have been so disappointed by the notion that this is a "game." I would love to have read this as a short story, or maybe even a short film. I appreciate what the creator originally set out to do. Dear Esther was so successful at grabbing me while pretending to be a terrible and ugly game. But I can't help but wonder how much more enjoyable (and accessible) it would be if it had chosen a more suitable medium to tell its story.