Look at all those lies people have stated. Every interpretation that is not 100% truth is a lie. Thirdly, the true interpretation of a story is the truth of a story. It's a game, just one of the first of its kind, which is why it grates on people like you so thoroughly. If it were "software", then you would be using it to draw a picture or compile PDF files or something. You manually move through the gameworld taking in the experience, and the dev's trickle-feed you story, atmosphere and presentation entirely as they intended. You use ASDF to move around, and mouse to look. You start it up, you have the option to "start new game", there are graphics, audio and control options. Well, it's in your Steam library for one, and that means it's enough of a game that Valve saw fit to allow it on their platform. Secondly, what's unique about this? Besides this not being a game, yet people call it that (even the devs!) Originally posted by Matthew 3:10:First off, how do you classify this as a game? Please, elaborate on all the elements that makes this a game? Why isn't this software under my software folder in my steam library? He has also mentioned he thinks he's done all this before. There are ghosts, and bits of the car wreckage, shrines, urns, not to mention all the books at the bottom of that one gully. It's certain the place he is in is not normal. Is his theft of the Hebrides book a coma dream, and was his conversation with Paul also a dream, or did any of these events happen in his real life. Esther has been dead for a while, so what happened to him? He says he has talked to Paul since the accident, and he stole some of the ashes from the funeral (Why would he need to steal them if Esther was his wife?) If he's in a coma as the dev commentary suggests, how did he get in that state. I'm not clear as to why he's in the state he's in from his dialogue, his kidney stones are long past, and the car accident was long past. Yup, basically it's a story about a happily married bloke expecting a child, then whap, it's all gone, and he has to come to grips with it before he releases himself from his self imposed comatose purgatory he's put himself in. So he can be with her again.īut then again, the above paragraph is just my (paraphrased) opinion of the story. Though he's, to some extent, able to come to terms with her passing (when you see the paper boats being sent out to sea near the end of the game), he doesn't fully 'recover', which is why he jumps from the tower at the end of the game. The island is (in my opinion) created as a result of the narrator's "descent into delusion/madness" as a result of her death. Shortly after he gets out of the hospital, Esther is in a car crash, and doesn't survive. The narrator's wife is pregnant (the ultrasound pictures inside the house in the 2nd chapter), while the narrator was in the hospital recovering from kidney stones (the multiple references to the stones, and when Esther came to visit him in the hospital). You have to pay attention to what the narrator says, and also pay attention to the surroundings. They wanted people to play through the game, and discuss what they thought the plot of the game was. But at the same time, it's a story that only games give us the freedom to hear.There's a story to it, though it's not plainly obvious what the story is. Stripped down to its constituent parts, there's very little game here at all. It charts a course through vastly different topics you never realised you cared about before – folklore, the Bible, shepherding, travel writing, guilt and medicine – and turns them into something meaningful without speaking down to its audience.ĭear Esther provokes thought and feeling in a way few other games do. Here, something as mundane as a lonely cottage on a hillside can end up lodged deeper in your gaming memory than the dragons and spaceships of countless other games. Without puzzles, the visuals and narrative are allowed to take precedence.ĭear Esther's atmosphere is the core of the game – it's all of the game – and that's a direct result of the haunting level design. With puzzles, it would just be a slightly more depressing Myst. But the lack of puzzles is necessary: it's crucial to the experience that you're allowed to keep moving at your own pace. As a game, it will draw criticism from those uninterested in narrative for not challenging the player: for all the evocative atmosphere, it's still an hour of wandering around and listening to a man speak.
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