I just played Dear Esther and I feel absolutely nothing.

It felt like a Half-life 2 mod with some triggered narration. I felt as though I was reading somebody’s short story — and by ‘reading’ I’m referring not just to the narration but to the piecing together of clues from the environment. And it wasn’t a very good story, because I knew exactly where it was going. Sure, it tried to do the whole ‘unreliable narrator’ thing, but then it basically jumped up and down and shouted ‘I’m an unreliable narrator! Don’t trust me!’.

Some of it is definitely comes down to The Path having an unfair advantage because it’s NOT a mod — it’s a fully grown, from-the-ground-up experience. From the menus to the graphical style to the controls, it’s all working towards the same design goal. Poor old Dear Esther had to make do with the Half-life 2 framework that was already in place, so we get chunky footsteps, a flashlight, bunny-hopping and horrible electronic noises when you press the ‘Use’ key. It was mood-breaking, but I could have ignored it for the sake of a brilliant story. This wasn’t a brilliant story.

It comes down to this: I can’t remember a single line of carefully-scripted dialogue from Dear Esther 2 hours after playing, but the images from the inside of Grandma’s house are permanently burned into my mind. I think the two games are more different than people acknowledge, and they’re both trying to accomplish different things, but The Path is just a more powerful and significant work of art.

At least it all ended in a rather uplifting manner.

I can’t really pinpoint my own reasons for feeling like this.
Possibly the indie art game crowd is right, and I’m an emotionally dead shell of a man. Perhaps I’m not quite as deep as I thought. Perhaps I just prefer the gleeful heart of a mod like Research and Development to the impenetrable cloud of pretentiousness that hangs over things like these. But I think it’s because, as Noise states, there needs to be something more.

I remember, after Dear Esther, I felt sort of melancholy. Then I played Radiator: Handle With Care. I was left feeling both sad and uplifted, knowing that I had destroyed a relationship, but also that I had set two men free from each other. And then I remember thinking; between this game and that one, the one which gets a glorifying essay, the one which changed Lewis’ views on gaming forever, is Dear fucking Esther? The harsh, beautiful gauntlet of emotional truth is inferior to the depressing Scottish island simulator? What the hell is up with that?

And I got lost near the start, which pretty much killed the entire experience for me as I bunny-hopped about in a vain search for the right path. Very much a game design flaw. And that may be another problem. Like the Path, this game/experience/interactive film/hatstand has been poorly designed. It shouldn’t be glazed over, the design is awful. And don’t say it isn’t really a game, because it fucking is and even if it isn’t experiences and interactive films and hatstands all need proper design. Sacrificing game design for story as an example of what games ‘could be’ is like shooting yourself in the left foot instead of the right and calling it an improvement.

Sorry for the nerd rage, but I needed to express how this game made me, personally, feel.

The Malevich of games is the original pong. Irreducible suprematism.

Also, everyone on this thread is wrong. No, nope, no reprieve for you my chap, or you. Especially not you. I mean that kindly and respectfully as the terms ‘art’ and ‘game’ and ‘experience’ have incredibly nebulous and contested definitions that can be modulated to justify one’s argument.

ART IS DEAD, LONG LIVE KING PENGUIN!

It felt incredibly polished (though I did have to turn the brightness up to see in some sections) and actually uses the whole audio-visual power of video games to great effect. It keeps up a blistering pace and I found some sections terribly unnerving. Also it allows a limited form of interaction in that you can get information about your environment, a nice compromise between interactivity and artistic control. Haven’t tried the second chapter yet, hopefully it will be as good as the first.