Dear Esther is a 2012 adventure game created and published by The Chinese Room. It was first made available in 2008 as a free version for the Source game engine. Later, the game was completely recreated for sale in 2012. The commercial version was released for Microsoft Windows in February 2012 and for OS X in May 2012. Versions for PlayStation 4 and Xbox One were released by Curve Digital in September 2016.
Dear Esther is a story-centered game with few ways for the player to interact with the environment. This design was debated when the game was first released but later became an important influence in game development. The player’s only goal is to explore a mysterious island in the Hebrides, Scotland, while listening to a man read letters to his late wife. Details about her unexplained death are uncovered as the player moves around the island.
Dear Esther received praise from critics and helped make the walking simulator genre more popular during the 2010s. The Chinese Room released a game inspired by Dear Esther, called Everybody's Gone to the Rapture, in 2015.
Gameplay and plot
The gameplay in Dear Esther is simple. The main goal is to explore a quiet island in the Hebrides. As you move around, you listen to a man whose name is not known reading parts of letters he wrote to his wife, Esther, who has passed away. Each time you reach a new place on the island, the game plays a new letter fragment that connects to that area. Every time you play the game, different audio pieces are revealed, creating a slightly different story each time. The narrator mentions other people, including a man named Donnelly, who mapped the island long ago; Paul, who may have been the drunk driver in the accident that caused Esther’s death; and Jakobson, a shepherd who lived on the island in the 1700s. As you explore, you find ruined buildings, a shipwreck, and a cave system with walls covered in pictures that look like chemical drawings, circuit diagrams, brain cells, and bacteria. At times, you see a person walking away in the distance, but they vanish before you can reach them. As the game continues, it becomes harder to tell who the characters are, and you must figure out the story for yourself.
Development and release
The original version of Dear Esther was one of many modifications created using the Source Engine by The Chinese Room while the group was still a research project at the University of Portsmouth. The project received funding from a grant given by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and was led by Dan Pinchbeck, a professor and teacher at the university. Pinchbeck wrote the story and script for the game, and he said that studying how William S. Burroughs wrote was a major influence. He also wanted to use more visual and symbolic language in the game instead of the typical descriptive style found in most video games.
In 2009, independent game artist Robert Briscoe began working on a complete remake of Dear Esther with full support from Pinchbeck. Briscoe and The Chinese Room worked together on the remaster, and Briscoe designed most of the game’s levels based on concept art created by Ben Andrews. Briscoe redesigned the island’s landscape to make it easier to navigate and added more visually interesting details to improve on the original game’s simple environment. In March 2011, during development, The Chinese Room lost financial support from the University of Portsmouth, which had been paying for the Source Engine license needed to release the game commercially. The university’s legal team refused to sign the license agreement. The Chinese Room then sought help from the Indie Fund, which was hesitant at first but agreed to fund the project after playing a demo. Indie Fund’s Ron Carmel said, “Once people started playing the game, the conversation changed completely, and many people wanted to support the project.” Within six hours of the remastered version being released on Steam, more than 16,000 copies were sold, allowing the developers to repay the Indie Fund.
The narrator’s voice in Dear Esther was performed by Nigel Carrington, whose script was expanded for the remake. The game’s music was composed by Jessica Curry, Pinchbeck’s wife, who is a freelance music composer and co-director of The Chinese Room. During the remake’s development, Curry rewrote and expanded the score to make it richer and longer, using more instruments and nearly doubling the length of the original soundtrack. The original game’s music was released for free in July 2008, shortly after the mod was first released. The remastered soundtrack was released on February 14, 2012.
In September 2016, Curve Digital’s Secret Mode, a publishing label of Sumo Digital, released versions of the game for PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. In February 2017, Secret Mode released an updated version of the game based on the Unity engine, called Dear Esther: Landmark Edition, as a free update. An iOS version of the game was released in October 2019.
Reception
The original version of the game Dear Esther was chosen for the Animation Exhibition at the 2008 Prix Ars Electronica and was listed among Mod DB’s top 100 mods of 2008. In 2009, the game received the award for Best World/Story at the IndieCade Independent Game awards.
In a 2009 review for Honest Gamers, Lewis Denby praised the game’s unique tone, noting that it “taps into an emotion that few games dare to approach: unhappiness.” He also highlighted the soundtrack by Curry, saying it created “an impressively ethereal atmosphere.” While reviewers praised the game’s story and premise, the original mod version faced criticism for poor level design and many glitches or bugs that made movement through the game world difficult.
The 2012 remastered version of Dear Esther received positive reviews on Windows, according to Metacritic. The PlayStation 4 and Xbox One versions had mixed reviews. Some reviewers questioned whether the game truly qualifies as a video game, but many praised its originality and the focus on storytelling. IGN stated that the game “will leave you feeling edified, contemplative, and possibly even emotionally moved.” Strategy Informer gave the game a 9/10, calling it “one of the most haunting and well-executed titles of this or any other generation.” However, some critics debated whether the video game format was the best way to tell Dear Esther’s story. Maxwell McGee of GameSpot argued that the story works well as a video game, possibly better than as a book or movie, because games allow for unique pacing and discovery. Allistair Pinsof of Destructoid disagreed, saying the game “would be better as a short film,” though he questioned whether the story’s vague plot and predictable ending would be effective in that format. Eurogamer criticized the writing, calling it “purple in places” and “wantonly obscure,” and joked that the game’s overuse of car metaphors “steers the writing into oncoming traffic.” However, the review praised the lasting impact of the story, stating that “its two-hour long chill will remain in your bones for a long while after.”
Reviewers were divided about the limited interaction between the player and the story. Allistair Pinsof of Destructoid noted that “the most pedestrian of stories can be convincing when coupled with intelligently applied interaction—something Dear Esther stubbornly stands against.” PC Gamer did not see the lack of puzzles as a problem, explaining that “the lack of puzzles is necessary: it’s crucial to the experience that you’re allowed to keep moving at your own pace. Without puzzles, the visuals and narrative are allowed to take precedence.”
Critics widely praised the detailed environment of Dear Esther. Joe Martin of bit-tech called the game “a graphical masterpiece,” noting that “what gives Dear Esther’s visuals such a poignant edge is how masterfully it extends the sense of loneliness and isolation that’s conveyed in the script.” Tom Hoggins of The Daily Telegraph highlighted the game’s smaller details, stating that “the broad strokes of Dear Esther’s visuals are majestic, but the finer details on the landscape are the most revealing.”
At the 2012 Independent Games Festival, Dear Esther won the prize for “Excellence in Visual Arts.” In 2012, Develop awarded the game the prize for “Best use of narrative.” At the TIGA Games Industry Awards 2012, the game won the “Originality Award” along with prizes for “Best Action/Adventure game,” “Best Visual Design,” “Best Audio Design,” and “Best Debut Game.” The game was nominated for five awards at the 9th British Academy Video Games Awards.
As of September 2013, the game had sold over 850,000 copies.