Dear esther cave mod#

I’ve heard game designers defy the notion that videogames are a medium, in the sense of a substance upon which creation imprints itself, like paper or canvas. The optional paths are more like footnotes, extra information that may be valuable to our reading of the text but also potentially extraneous. We’re empowered to walk off the path but the inability to run discourages it once we realize how painfully slow backtracking can be. The paragraphs are not the literal ones read aloud but the caves and vistas and shacks that trigger them. The flowers, rocks and grass are the words. It is broken up into four chapters any of which may be selected once the player has finished them, but I can’t imagine not sitting down and playing the entire game at once, every time I play it, because more than anything else, Dear Esther is a short story.Įach step forward in Dear Esther is reading a line. Dear Esther is an exploration of an island upon which we are ostensibly shipwrecked, with voiceover passages and matching paragraphs of text triggered as we walk over certain locations. There is only walking, looking, and listening. There is no running, no jumping, no picking up or throwing. It has a little Myst in its digital DNA, but there are no puzzles to be solved beyond the strictly intellectual.

It would be a damned shame, if you have the ten dollars to spare, that you didn’t give Dear Esther the few hours of your time it richly deserves.ĭear Esther bears no resemblance to most of our videogame experiences. It may be as important to contemplation of where our medium has been and is going as Shadow of the Colossus, Bioshock, and Passage. It raises as many legitimate questions as it answers, which in my experience is always a sign of a thing’s profundity. I am cautious about invoking the dreaded “should” statement unless it’s important, but you really should play Dear Esther if you haven’t already.

Dear esther cave mod#

Dear Esther is a Half-Life 2 mod that was released for distribution in 2008, and re-released last week as a commercial product on Steam.