Worlds like those in Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture, Firewatch and Gone Home all feel so much more expansive. Having said all that, however, it’s plainly obvious how far the so-called “walking simulator” genre has come in the years since Dear Esther was released. The plot is fine for what it is one man, alone in isolation, exploring his grief isn’t a topic that gets covered much in video games, so it’s easy to see why the game was so praised on its initial release.
The voice acting is pretty good, which is important, seeing as there’s only one speaker - voiced by Nigel Carrington - and it’s on him to carry the whole game in that regard. The landscapes are appropriately foreboding, befitting a game that’s all about mourning and loss. In a vacuum, I don’t think it could be said that Dear Esther is a bad game. The story, the music, the voice acting, the world: Dear Esther operates on a much smaller scale in every respect, causing it to feel more like an impressive demo than a full-on game.Īdmittedly, this isn’t a failing on the part of the game so much as it’s a failing on my part to set appropriate expectations. All the stuff that made Everybody’s Gone To The Rapture great in my eyes is only here in embryonic form. Because really, that’s the most salient fact about Dear Esther: while it certainly sets the stage for what The Chinese Room did in their later outing, that’s really all it does. Turns out I should’ve adjusted those expectations to account for the fact that Dear Esther was the game that preceded Everybody’s Gone To the Rapture. If that wasn’t reason to be optimistic, I don’t know what would be.
While I’d consciously made an effort to hear as little about the game as possible - as I do with any narrative-focused experience - what little I did know centred around the fact that it was made by The Chinese Room, who were the team responsible for one of my favourite games of all time, Everybody’s Gone To The Rapture (our review here). I went into Dear Esther with improbably high expectations.
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