E3 2014: After Dear Esther, Everybody's Gone to the Rapture

. Gee I wonder if this game will be pretentious and over-wrought too...

I'm excited for this. I guess I'm not as presumptive as some people.

this is supposed to be exciting ? A wheat field and a ball of light...

That's an interesting take on a Bioshock prequel

After Dear Esther and Machine for Pigs, I'll definitely be waiting for impressions on this after it comes out. I hope it's good but yeah, I need game mechanics to keep me engaged.

What is it with the gaming community using the word "rapture" so ironically?

rap·ture

ˈrapCHər/noun

1. feeling of intense pleasure or joy."Leonora listened with rapture"

@astrophyle:

2. The transporting of a person from one place to another, especially to heaven. There are no people in the trailer, as they have presumably all left Earth.

Anyway, I am sure Jeff will be psyched at the prospect of a game having numbers stations in it.

What about that middling Amnesia game are we just going to pretend that didn't happen?

@apothaeos: makes me wonder, with the countdown voice in the background of that trailer, if the Earth was abandoned for space travel to elsewhere, and you play someone or something wandering through the remnants of a town after everyone left Earth.

Dear Esther is one of the best experiences I've ever had with a game, so I'm extremely excited about this game.

This trailer sucked, though.

I'm excited for this one. Dear Esther was a surprisingly affecting experience, Machine For Pigs was horrifying, and Jessica Curry's scoring of both was downright haunting.

Wait, Santa Monica Studios AND the Chinese Tea Room? This will almost definitely be a day-one purchase for me. The team at Chinese Tea Room have a way of creatiing incredibly immersive worlds through, what I consider, the best writing in the video-game industry, period, and fantastic sound-tracks. Their artstyle, beautiful, at times hauntingly so, at other times disturbingly so, is on par with the very best of them.

That said, from a purely technical stand-point, their games have been rather lackluster, neither "A Machine for Pigs" or "Dear Esther" were visual powerhouses, so this colaboration could lead to something truly mesmerizing to look at.

@lifeasclarity: If there's something we've learned from Chinese Tea Room's previous games, then it is that nothing is like it seems, so hey, your theory might turn out to be completely accurate. From the look of it, though, it just seems as if you're the last living person in the world and that you, too, have a set amount of time before that ceases to be the case, and so the game will focus on a profound sense of loneliness and loss as their previous games have.

Games like Dear Esther, and presumably this, (aka weird walking around "artsy" games) are the type of early-in-the-morning-with-coffee-one-play-session kind of games that I'm entirely okay with. Doesn't mean they're necessarily good, but I still find them to be interesting.

I think my enjoyment of this game will be based totally on whether or not you 'solve' the mystery. I hate stories where you finish them with more questions and no answers.

Dear Esther is a game I'm glad I played, but I spent less than I would on lunch for the game and I feel like that low barrier to entry helped me enjoy what was there. Hopefully this game has a bit more meat on its bones. Still, for a trailer that didn't show much I still found it intriguing.

I don't know man... not feeling it. >_<

Looks good!

Yay. This trailer isn't very good but after both excellent prior games I have no qualms about picking up a game from The Chinese Room day 1.

You're going to have to show me more than that.

I like exploration games, I like post-apocalpyse, hopefully i'll like this. Although this trailer tells me bugger all....pretty tho.

Anyone have an idea of release date...year...

anyone know anything about this one?

Well one thing is clear: You don't know what the word pretentious means.

Without using a direct definition, to be pretentious is to imply more value or importance to something that isn't actually worth such consideration.

I don't see anyone from the development team doing that -- not in this trailer or anywhere else. You're applying the label based solely on the fact that there are no bros screaming at other bros. Any time the narrative slows down and isn't loaded with guns and drab colors and the same first-person crashing vehicle cutscene we've seen 1000 times, it must be pretentious, right?

Additionally, a game could not be pretentious in the way that was originally stated. The developers could be pretentious and characters within the game could be pretentious, but an item cannot truly imply more value or importance to itself. A person can do that though. An article could. In some ways, the intent or design of a game trailer could, but there would almost always be a person at the source of the pretension - not an object.

What an insightful trailer. .-.

Hey we made these environments, but don't have the budget for gameplay. Hmm.. artsy video game!! It will probably be an ok "game" (digital interactive experience), when one feels in the mood for a mellow stroll down depression alley.

For all the lamenting about yearly sequels and the same genres dominating the market with pleas for more original games, many people sure are dismissive of things that are different in ways they aren't interested in.

Yeah, it's thrown around way too much. As soon as a game isn't something instantly familiar, it's labelled pretentious and thrown aside by a large amount of people—and yet those same people complain every time E3 comes around that we're just getting sequels.

Edit: Anyway, this looks beautiful and the little bit of information about this that we have so far has interested me enough that I'll most likely buy it.

You've arrived at those conclusions from a single trailer? Or have I missed the press release where they announced 'lack of gameplay'? What constitutes 'gameplay'? Must there be guns, weapons? Is there a quota of things to do that must be met before it's labelled a game rather than a 'digital interactive experience'?

It boggles my mind. I truly have no idea what some people want from this hobby.

I like to think of these Dear Esther type games, rambler-likes if you will, as what would happen if you took the NPCs and the shit combat out of Skyrim.

@pxabstraction said:

The game will almost certainly not have much in the way of mechanics. If you look at even something like A Machine for Pigs, where they had the obvious foundation set by the original Amnesia, they stripped out all of the resource scarcity (lantern fuel, tinderboxes) and stripped out the sanity meter stuff, with the only remaining mechanics being "outsmart the monster AI" and "solve some simple puzzles". I expect this game to be a lot like Dear Esther, by which I mean it will be kind of obtuse and I won't get a lot out of its story though I'll give it points for atmosphere I guess.

For future reference, the studio is called The Chinese Room, likely a reference to this thought experiment.

HAHAHAHAHAHA what a complete waist of the devs time.

Seems some what interesting.... : /

It's a shame Steam got rid of the "not a game" tag.

Yes -- the circle-jerk beckons, you pathetic, sorry excuse for a nerd. Would you prefer a moeshit jrpg? Your comment is terrible, as are the four above yours.

Why so hostile, friend? Have I wronged you in some way? Why do you hate JRPG's and what do they have to do with anything I just said?

The "not a game" tag is not an insult as you seem to have implied. It simply means there is no skill for which to master, much like your average visual novel, things which also aren't games. By taking it as an insult, people like you have stripped the gaming community of the needed vocabulary to describe this new type of software.

The negative comments about this game are infuriating to me. Dear Esther was a game that is NOT made for all audiences, people that say it's a waste of time or boring are clearly NOT the people the game is intended for. Why bother belittling something that is CLEARLY over your head (and I don't mean that to say you're too stupid or ignorant) I personally adored Dear Esther, I preferred A Machine for Pigs, and I will most certainly love this game to bits.

Now I really hate it when people say "if you don't like *insert IP here* don't comment" because that implies that negative criticism is not welcomed when it should be. But the kind of criticism this developer's games receive tends to lean toward turning the games into something they never intended to be in the first place and ignoring what the games have accomplished. If your criticism is "add mechanics" or "give it a story" you have already proven that your ideals are not inline with what the game is going for.

Why don't we all stop fighting and watch the trailer from last year?

Quickly dismissing something as "Pretentious": A tacit admission of the inadequacy of the critical apparatus somehow becoming - as it has done so often - a means of undervaluing creative endeavour.

Calm down dude. The game will come out and you will still be alive. People opinions man, that's all. By the way, YOUR comment sounded pretty offensive and hostile. Probably would fall under the "terrible" category as well?

Really excited for this, but it's a shame it's a PS4 exclusive. That trailer showed absolutely nothing though.

The Rapture has really gone downhill...