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

The problem with Dear Esther is not that there isn't really much gameplay and that you are just walking around, nor is it that it tries for something "arty" which seems to be used as a pejorative. The problem was that it didn't do a good enough job of contextualising the voice-over with your location in the environment, it never felt as though you were discovering something that you were then told about as much as the voice-over was arbitrarily being triggered as you walked. I think this is why people claim Dear Esther is not a game. On top of that the prose was not very good, it was pretentious in the pejorative, vague statements that were not enlightening or intriguing. I hope the developers are able to move beyond what, to me was holding them back (I never played their amnesia game).

I enjoyed games like Gone Home, Proteus and Jazz Punk. In these games all you do (mostly) is walk around and experience interactions that you trigger. I have my reasons beyond mechanics for liking each of them, whereas I did not like Dear Esther, The Stanley Parable or Thirty Flights of Loving (which I consider all to be of a certain type). I could explain my stance on each, but I would not reduce them to having no gameplay or being too arty. They are still games whether you like them or not

@hazelnuttz: I mostly agree with you, but I feel that saying that something is over someone's head or they just didn't understand it is equally as dismissive as someone saying that its pretentious. Some people are being reductive but to say that if someone doesn't like it then it went over their head is silly, maybe they did understand it but had other valid criticisms.

These games are not for me, as much as I wish they were ... but I love that they exist and hope many peope enjoy them.

The fact you would think it's offensive and hostile to call something not a game shows what's wrong with the gaming community.

Yeah, that was my issue with Dear Esther as well. I have no problem with people doing first-person exploration games, but if you're going to make one that has a story that is not at all concrete or direct, you better make sure your prose is pretty fucking good. And I just don't think Dear Esther managed that.

I don't even mind that it didn't necessarily contextualize the narration with your location. For me (like you said), the narration just wasn't enlightening or intriguing. I know it wasn't setting out to be a gripping page-turner of a mystery with plot points A, B, and C. It's like the video game version of a poem; it doesn't expressly have to tell a story with a beginning and end, and it's minimum goal is to just evoke a feeling or thought within you, through language (and in this case, graphics). But if all these letters to Esther, and mentions of the car accident, and then other mentions of the shepherd who used to live on the island a hundred years ago, and then eventually the narrator starts blurring people together because it's trying to make metaphors or something, if all that was supposed to be evocative and moving, it just wasn't. It was a muddled tale, and sucks to be this guy who (probably?) lost his wife in a car accident, but the style of storytelling actively prevented me from getting invested in really anything the narrator had to say for the duration of the game.

The environment was beautiful, but it feels like the whole game hinges on you, the player, having this nostalgia-for-a-time-before-you-were-born, a time when people wrote each other letters frequently, and women were named Esther. I honestly believe that the people who profess to like Dear Esther were sold on the idea, top to bottom, within the first minutes, when they arrived at this lonely island and the narrator started saying "Dear Esther" a few times, and they thought to themselves "Oooh, isn't it tragic that old people used to write letters to loved ones they couldn't be near, and also people died". What followed could've been just about anything, and I'm convinced these people would've liked Dear Esther regardless, because what it actually delivers after those first few minutes is just obtuse and murky. Their standards seem low, because it seems like they bought into Dear Esther pretty much based on the premise.

I think The Stanley Parable does a little better, in that at least it has humour to lean on, and isn't trying to move you deeply. Some of the jokes work, some don't, some just go on too long but not in a funny way, but overall I liked the ways The Stanley Parable poked fun at video game narratives and player agency within them.