Dear Esther Review

2008‘s Dear Esther, a Source modification developed by thechineseroom, originally a research project group at the University of Portsmouth, was perhaps the most singular game release of that year. In a sense, its arrival brought with it some degree of legitimacy to modifications with narrative and writing in mind.

Encouraged by the game’s overwhelmingly positive reception and feedback, and the initiative of esteemed level designer Robert Briscoe, writer and designer Dan Pinchbeck set out to remake the original, which has now been released on Steam. At the end of 2011, Dear Esther’s popularity and anticipation had reached a deserved fever pitch due to Briscoe’s amazing visual work, and indeed, just a mere six hours after release, the developers had already successfully recouped their investment from the Indie Fund.

Yet here I stand, a review copy in hand, feeling a puzzling hesitance over reopening the metaphorical wounds inflicted by the original. Certainly, I had nothing short of thrusted the ghostly modification upon all my videogaming friends, toting its expert writing and unrivalled narrative exposition. Nabeel Burney wrote about the specifics of the mod here on the Slowdown.

Like Nabeel, I too enjoyed – if that be the word (probably not) – the game immensely. That was not the problem.

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Quote of the Day: Jim Rossignol

The message for the games industry is clear: you don’t have to have pretensions to art – because here is a game that could not be more unpretentious in an artistic sense – for your game to have a serious message. Even the manshooter can be about something, without having to carefully distance itself with irony or hyperbolic absurdity. But crucially there is also scope to do shooters differently on a mechanical level. They do not have to be linear rollercoasters, nor multiplayer menageries. They can be slow. Even contemplative. –Jim Rossignol, “On The Importance Of S.T.A.L.K.E.R.” @ Rock, Paper, Shotgun

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Quote of the Day: Rich Lawrence

Most of the key people involved in this publish, on the game team and our platform side, have been here very long days and every day leading up to this. I just had to tell some folks that had been here for 30+ hours to go get some sleep. If there was any way I thought we could be certain you’d be able to play with everything correct tonight, we would have done that. –Rich Lawrence, SOE CTO, on the EverQuest II F2P downtime

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Quote of the Day: Terry Gilliam

“You just sit there and watch the explosions,” Gilliam said. “I couldn’t tell you what the movie was about. The movie hammers the audience into submission. They are influenced by video games, but in video games at least you are immersed; in these movies you’re left out. In films, there’s so much overt fantasy now that I don’t watch a lot because everything is possible now. There’s no tension there.” –Terry Gilliam @ Hero Complex

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