“To be fair, it wasn't really a failing of the design per se, but a shortcoming of the Source engine and how it handles large outdoor environments.” “One of the most common complaints about the original was the tediousness of trudging through the simplistic landscape between audio cues and landmarks, which made exploring rather unrewarding,” he says. The story was fascinating, the ideas great, but the island worked against the game: players were getting lost, or stuck, or bored. It stuck in my mind for days afterwards, and although I toyed with the idea of translating Dear Esther's core mechanics to my own designs, I couldn't shake the feeling that there was so much untapped potential in the original, if only for a proper coat of paint and a more polished design.”įor Briscoe, Dear Esther's main weakness was the island itself. “A simple, highly original idea which was singularly focused on telling a story through the environment. “It was the inspiration I'd been looking for,” he recalls. Bible verses scrawled all over the island, and a flashing radio tower omnipresent in your view. Enormous chunks cut out of a cliff face in perfectly straight lines. Chemical equations etched into the sides of a cavern. Depending on how you read it, they might not even be three separate people at all. You learn of a syphilitic shepherd, an explorer whose infected injury sent him insane, and a man destroyed by guilt after a fatal car accident. The audio clips tell you about the island's history while simultaneously documenting a terrible accident back home in England. Instead, it builds atmosphere and an emotional weight. But it's also – and this is really important to me – about love and hope and redemption, and how people cling to each other in the face of a brutal, uncaring world.”ĭubbed 'an interactive ghost story', Dear Esther is never overtly scary. “Grief, loss, guilt, faith, illness,” says Pinchbeck, when I ask about his interpretation of the Dear Esther story.
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