Story Beats: Dear Esther

I realize I forgot to credit The Sixth Sense in the Movies Featured section of the credits. Not that you didn't all recognize it, but the shot of Bruce Willis at the end? That's The Sixth Sense.

[TactownGirl]

I got the impression that you were playing as Ester and hearing the letters from your husband as you wonder the afterlife.

[dayliss]

I think its important to mention the chemical symbol drawn on the wall in the house in the opening chapter. It's the chemical structure of ethanol which is what makes alcohol alcoholic (perhaps relating to the car crash) . Maybe it's because I've played a lot of games like this before I played Dear Esther, but after that I immediately started to think of the game and the island as a whole as metaphorical.

[Cybershell]

Man I'm so glad I subscribed to this channel. Infrequent, but extremely high quality content!

[robertbauer]

As I played Dear Esther, I felt as though I were a stranger who chanced upon the letters to Esther, found out where they were written from, and came to the island to read them.

[michaelpisciarino]

0:03 Car, where Esther died

0:16 A pier off an island
0:38 Piecing together basics
1:06 Written about current experiences

1:44 Hyperreal?
2:07 Fall down waterfall. The scene of the accident. In a pool. In a cave.
2:33 Haunted feeling
3:04 Motion, turning pages, pulled forward through it
3:32 Sinking, deep in the dream/place

3:55 Dense text, reread
4:15 1 1/2- 10 hours

4:34 What is And is not a Dream?
+ Doubt protagonist, here
+ You doubt your own perceptions
Has anything been real?
4:57 Discrepancies
-
- Broken Leg?
- Wrecked car?
- Brush blowing in the wind, figures in the distance

Is this Island Real
5:58 Is the narrator dead?

6:26 Feeling of lack when love exists in memory
7:07 New details pop up. _Memory is Fallible_
7:44 _A tragedy may never make sense_

[dstarr]

I keep forgetting that this isn't "Every Frame a Painting."

[CmdrPinkiePie]

I always figured that we are playing as either Esther or her lover, walking through a personal purgatory they've been in for what seems forever until our playthrough, where at the end, the narrator finally accepts what happened in the past, and leaves their purgatory to ascend into the final beyond.

[EmotivePixels]

I've played this so many times and the ghosts/figures thing just wrinkled my brain.

[WandaThePanda]

Honestly, while playing the game I never assumed or felt like I was a character of the story

As the narrator began when the game starts, I assumed he was someone telling me a story, maybe with a letter or through a 4th wall breaking expository piece. I can't really say exactly why, but I didn't assume that those where the thoughts that "my" character was thinking.

And all throughout the game, I kept having the sensation that I was exploring someone else's story, even as a character. I felt like a guest wandering through somebody's memory, or purgatory, or whatever.

For some reason, I also never took the island for "real". That's not me saying "oh, I'm so smart that I figured it out immediately!", I just had the feeling very early on that the setting of the game wasn't trying to present itself as an actual place, actually somewhere. I guess the absence of interaction with items or characters, combined with the narrator talking inside my head, quickly made me suspicious about the nature of that place.


I really appreciated your analysis of the game and I think you made very interesting points, but as I remember how perplexed the game left me I really can't say that I am sure if what you see in this game was actually there or if it was mostly out of a well done but also "creative" interpretation. Or at least, to what degree the merit goes to the creators or to the interpreter.

I think I might be sounding like a dick for some reason, but that's not my intention, mainly my poor second-language English is preventing me from expressing myself properly. Anyway, I'll stop, 'cause I've already wrote too much.

[leslieviljoen]

I watched part of this, stopped, played through Dear Ester and then finished watching it. Thanks for the great analysis!

[CaesarsSalad]

In my interpretation, the protagonist wasn't dead, he was in a coma from the crash and the brain tried to make sense of what happened after extreme trauma. Eventually it failed and the protagonist dies when the screen fades to black in the end.

[wildoesthings]

This analysis is SO INCREDIBLE. I wrote a paper in my undergrad with a large chunk focused on this game, and you said everything I wanted to say but so much more elegantly. It's great to hear more respect for this game, which I think gets shit on just, like, constantly, for really silly reasons based mostly in conjecture about authorial intent.

[DanElvey]

This game was seriously talked down on when it came out. thank you for this.

[TheUncommonVideo]

Huh, it turns out I actually missed the car crash scene. When I fell in the pool I immediately struggled to the surface rather than looking around my environment.

I like to think that was the character avoiding dealing with the memory.

[KK_Slider]

I know that this hasn't got anything to do with the actual conversation in the video but I live in Scotland and no, caves off the coast of Scotland most certainly don't look like that :P

[criticalinput]

I only just played this game and never pieced together that it was about a car accident. Though I also didn't get the accident scene underwater, I got the gurney and tied that to the kidney stones (I believe that was the narrator's health concern). Due to this I assumed the island was his "life flashes before my eyes" moment where he both examined his life's high points while also dwelled on what lies beyond.

[RazorbackPT]

I liked Dear Esther as a mood piece. I've replayed about 3 times now just because I like hanging out in that island. But from a narrative standpoint, I felt more like it was speaking in a foreign language. I got pretty much nothing out of it. There was a car crash was pretty much all I could decipher myself. In order to get a similar level of understanding of the story as you describe it in this video, I would probably have to get a transcript of all the dialogue and really study it. On a single playthrough I can't imagine how anyone can "get it". Maybe I'm just slow, I dunno.

[stijnvandrongelen]

Is there anything in Dear Esther that makes it implausible for the player character to be Esther?

[ElVagoJuegos]

Brilliant man, I love it. I hope to see more of this.

[djskipperriver]

The developers created a landscape that changes with each playthrough, and mostly evokes a sense of emptiness and melancholia. The game mechanics are limited to exploring this environment, with the pathways, in a sense, serving as loading screens between the letters. Ghosts briefly appear while walking the island. The slow, sad piano and ethereal, orchestral sound track build over the course of the game and further increase the sense of being in a half-awake dream state. The letters tell various stories, all of which intend to create a sense of melancholy. The landscapes all imply a degree of human rot, natural beauty, and finally the beauty of death and memorials.

Did the developers accomplish this goal? For Innuendo Studios, yes! All of these elements seemingly came together to create a moving experience.

For me? Heck no. The drab island colors make the first part of the game painful, not melancholic, in that it feels like I'm walking through the landscape of a crappily made mod -- understandable, considering that's what it started as. Further, the 'gorgeous' caves and the eerie landscapes look rather rote and bland, or at least they did by the time I played. The ending candle scene impressed me, but subsequently Bioshock Infinite's opening has blown all comparative scenes with candles out of the water. The limited mechanics and walking speed leave me jiggling back and forth impatiently. Certainly, the mechanics of walking around that island aren't going to save the game if the other pieces don't stand up, and the slow walking makes me feel like I'm forced to experience the game through a bucket of tar. I certainly don't feel like a ghost, and even if I did feel floaty, then I'd just blame that on a built-in feature of the system if you're not a very good game developer, not a special element of game feel created for this world. The sound design is, at least, fitting, if you're into the I Am Setsuna track on repeat, mixed with a bit of New Age, but if that's not your jam, your ears are going to be pounded into bleak submission. Worst of all are the letters. Maybe for Inneundo Studios, the letters were evocative and special, but for me, the letters reeked of pretention. I felt like I was forced to sit through cliched readings of vaguely emo poetry. Each reading actively made me want to shut off the game. The writing didn't so much make me feel melancholia as screamed at me to feel melancholia, and instead I felt critical and bored out of my skull and desiring an end to this bleak and miserable game. Maybe that is melancholia! But wanting to blow my brains out because the narrative is bad, and wanting to blow my brains out because the narrative is so good at making me feel terrible, is a huge, huge difference. Part of the negative reaction to Dear Esther is justified, arguably, because the level of writing and self-importance gives the game such a strong aura of 'pretentious art game' that one can see the developer's nose stuck firmly in the air from miles away.

Was it worth the doing? That depends. Is crafting a story that is secretly all a fever dream worth doing? Absolutely not. The 'all just a dream' trope is a cute way of saying 'none of this matters'. If anything, it's just a cute idea to throw in at the end of a game (see Mario), but basing a whole story around this trope is a narrative jerk move.

How about exploration of dreams? That is worth doing, and certain games have taken a great look at the scenarios of dreams, such as The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening, Yume Nikki, To the Moon, just to name a few. It's not a bad theme to look at all. To the Moon is especially notable for being a look into the dreams and memories of a dying man, which also seems to be Dear Esther's conceit.

And how about exploration of melancholia and misery? Ha, that barely even needs to be defended: so many, soooo so so many great games have looked at those themes.

But let's look at another element. Is bleak, drab color and level design a goal worth aspiring to? Arguably, no, especially after the miserable browns and greys of late 2000s shooters. Boring the player to death isn't a great goal. However, Dear Esther also attempts to create beautiful, evocative environments, and attempts to tell stories with the environment itself, and those are worthy goals, even if Dear Esther itself is boring slag.

The most contentious question: are walking simulators worth creating? I'd argue that we can't really judge an experience for what it's not trying to do. A lack of mechanics is a choice. However, the game then needs to be really fantastic with its other elements to make up for that lack of mechanics, in the same way as a game with no music maybe needs to try harder with its other aspects. Clearly, games with walking in them are worth making, as are games with environmental storytelling, as are games with heavy emphasis on storytelling. I really enjoyed Gone Home. I loved The Vanishing of Ethan Carter, but that does have some puzzle mechanics. I really enjoyed Stanley Parable, and that definitely counts! And I enjoyed The Beginner's Guide. So yes, I think these sorts of games are worth making. I just don't see Dear Esther as a great example of them, with the exception that maybe the graphics were groundbreaking at the time, and the soundtrack just might not be my taste.

Of course, 2012, when Dear Esther came out, was the same year that Dishonored, Far Cry 3, Journey, and Mass Effect 3 came out, so even compared to other games like it at the time, it was visually a sack of garbage and not all that creative (except maybe the candles at the end?).

In any case, what's interesting is that the element of 'it's all an evocative dream space, but that's the twist!' is something I find really lowbrow and, in other mediums, considered a joke or a punchline, but Innuendo Studios celebrates this as an exciting element that shows how great games can be. That, to me, is putting lipstick on a pig.