Dear Esther and Complex Simplicity

Introduction

Dear Esther is a game with a small amount of controversy surrounding it. Originally a Half-Life 2 mod from 2007, the game saw a standalone release in 2012, and a remastered version in 2017. Dear Esther is commonly known as the first "walking simulator", a subgenre of adventure games that has since grown in popularity. Walking simulators are first-person adventure games, primarily characterized by their low amounts of interactivity, slow movement, and heavy narrative focus. Although first-person, a game like Myst would not fall under the Walking Sim category. These games do not typically have puzzles or challenges to overcome. They often do not have a fail state at all. The entire focus is on the environment and narrative of the game.

I'll admit, when these types of games first started appearing, I absolutely jumped on the hate bandwagon. The decision to play this game was a secondhand one; it promised to be short, require little of me, and be easy to complete. 2017's Landmark Edition was given out free to those who owned the original, and it had achievements. I believe I acquired the game through a Humble Bundle. I played it and dropped it before finishing the game (impressive since the game is a maxiumum of 90 minutes long!).

I was pleasantly surprised when I returned to this title. As I get a bit older, I've started to have more respect for games that respect my time as a person. It is rare that I complete a game and say, "Wow, that was incredible, I really wish there was more game to play." This game is perfectly paced, and every part of it was given serious attention.

As I progressed through the game's 4 stages, I found myself enjoying Dear Esther in ways that I did not expect. After listening to the developer commentary, there are too many ideas that I found value in not to write something about the game. I will separate this review into sections discussing the gameplay, themes, sound design, game design, and story. I will attempt to leave any spoiler-y discussion towards the end, but if you've read this far, just go play it first, it's short, and the summary is, it's a good game.

Gameplay

One of the biggest questions on my mind as I played this game was, what constitutes a video game? One of Dear Esther's standout features is its lack of features. I could talk at length about what a video game is not, but I won't. Instead, I will discuss the three key aspects of Dear Esther that classify it as a game, rather than a piece of fiction.

Choices

Gameplay in Esther boils down to traversing a path and listening to narrative voiceovers. There is no jump or sprint. Your flashlight turns on automatically, and aside from the 4 collectibles in the game, there is nothing to interact with at all. One of a game's most crucial components is its interactivity, so how can Dear Esther get away with so little, yet still be called a game?

The answer is to provide players with a simple decision. Typically paths through the stages will branch, with different voiceover and musical cues possibly tied to either. The player has the ability to backtrack and listen to all the voiceovers or not, but the agency is the key factor. This tiny bit of interactivity is the separator, but when playing, it doesn't really seem like a flaw. It feels more like a distillation or refinement of the components necessary to make a game. This sort of minimal philosophy is one of the core design principles that the team expressed in the developer's commentary of the game. All of that may sound pretentious, but ask yourself while playing: "Does this feel like a game?" For me, the answer was still yes.

Rewards

One of the more interesting portions in the first chapter's commentary was programmer Jack Morgan speaking on his intentional placement of dead-end areas without voiceovers or music. This will be touched on more in the Themes section, but here Morgan highlighted that he wanted to give players rewards for exploring. These purposeful dead-ends contain props that are never referenced directly, but give the players things to draw context from. The player feels that they have gained a greater understanding of what is going on, regardless of whether it is actually true.

Progression

As an ADHD-haver, attention span can be my biggest enemy when it comes to completing games. One of the reasons I tend to enjoy games that take longer to complete is that sense of getting better, growing stronger, and seeing the numbers go up. Dear Esther has no combat or puzzles. How did the development team address this lack of "hook-factor" when it comes to game design?

They added one prop. That's it. It's a big radio tower at the top of the island with a flashing red light. You can see it from the very start of your pathwalking adventures. If you are thrust into the game with no indication of what it is, and you see a giant flashing tower at the top of something, what do you think will eventually happen? It's simple, but it's almost impressively simple, and it works. I've subtitled this review "Complex Simplicity" for a reason, but we will touch more on it later.

Side Note - Replayability

One of two additional game-like aspects I noticed in Dear Esther was its replayability. I would not classify replayability as a hard requirement for a game, but it is a pro that is hard to replicate in other forms of media. In context of this game, each voiceover cue picks from one of multiple potential dialogues to play. This was 3 separate dialogues in the 2012 release, but was bumped up to 4 in the 2017 remaster.

Do that math for a second. 4 completely different dialogues per voiceover point, with each stage having somewhere around 10. It's impressive, but why go to all the trouble? More on that later too. Another thing to note is that I had no idea about this feature until after I had completed the game and gone through the developer's commentary. As I continued to listen to the game designer, composer, and writer all talk about their intentions, it became clear that a lot of work goes into maintaining an illusion of things being simple or mundane.

Side Note - Death

The last gameplay aspect I will address is that of player death. I do not believe that something needs to have a lose state, or even a win state, to be classified as a game. Either way, both are present in Dear Esther. At some point during the design phase, the team had to make a decision between removing player agency and accounting for death. There are extremely few barriers or invisible walls in Dear Esther. The development team decided that ensuring the player's immersion wasn't broken was more important than removing the possibility of them doing something they didn't want. Funnily enough, at one point during the development of the original mod, death was accompanied by the stock Half-Life 2 death sound.

Themes (Spoilers)

If you haven't realized it by now, Dear Esther is a vibes game. But more than that, it is a vibes only game. You walk, and listen to the character speak, and sometimes music plays, and sometimes it doesn't.

The diction of the main character is very dense and prose-like. After listening to maybe my fourth voiceover I thought to myself, "Wow, this dude is really waxing lyrical." I decided at that point to let what my character was saying sort of wash over me rather than pay close attention to his exact phrasing. I focused on picking up the general tone of what he was saying, and if something interesting stuck out, I would think about it as I walked to the next voiceover point.

As it turns out, this was completely intentional! I felt relieved when they said this in the commentary. All three of the developers present expressed that they wanted to emphasize mood and ambience over everything else.

The game is mysterious on purpose. The developers have admitted that a lot of the story "doesn't make any sense" and that's on purpose. The goal is to leave the story open to interpretation. In my first playthrough I felt like I understood most of what was going on, but certain voiceovers seemed to directly contradict others. Once again, this was highlighted in the commentary as being an intentional choice, and I actually love it. A conscious effort was made to have no "true" interpretation to the story. The writing emphasizes this by giving narrative hints that let the player believe they understand the story, then intentionally undercutting that understanding. This absolutely happened to me multiple times in my first playthrough. I was ready to harp on this game as soon as a somewhat cliche trope came up, but the number of contradictions really kept me interested.

The randomized props add to the mystery of the game, and can give implications to the story, depending on if they are noticed or spawn. One example the game designer gave was the presence of an ultrasound photo in the hilltop house in chapter 2. The implication the photo provides adds another layer of tragedy to the story, but its presence is not guaranteed, nor is it guaranteed that the player will notice it.

This game is eerie! There were a couple of times where I felt unnerved, and the thing is, nothing happens. The developers mentioned this phenomenon in their commentary. They were actually surprised that players mentioned being scared, but they attribute it to the overall lack of things happening being stressful. There was more than one occasion when I was incredibly thankful Dear Esther was not a 2020s indie horror game. Having the confidence to hold back is impressive, and it's something present throughout every aspect of the game.

Sound

The music has been remastered with live instrumentation. The original soundtrack was heavily sample-based due to budget limitations. The composer leaned heavily into manipulation and time dilation of samples to create an eerie, mysterious feel to the songs heard on the island. They elected to keep a lot of the original design philosophy when remastering the soundtrack. The more synthetic samples have been preserved, but the violin and piano has been elevated with live recording. The end result is, for the most part, quite good.

The soundtrack's main motif, Remember, was actually not originally written for the game! The composer had written a piece of choral music years before that had gone unused. The first part of that piece was used as the main musical motif for Dear Esther. The motif plays throughout the game, becoming more manipulated and dissonant as you gain context on the actions of the main character. I appreciated this aside from the composer. It often feels like an unused song or a half-baked idea is useless, so it's encouraging to see someone use their old work years after it had been written.

The music itself is actually quite sparse. Musical cues are placed at specific points on the path. The composer explained that giving the player time to think and interpret, rather than telling them how to feel at all times, was an important design principle for her to follow.

Game Design

This is a very interesting case study for anyone interested in game development. The developer's commentary gives the perspectives of the writer, the composer, and the game designer. Each of the three has a unique set of challenges and vastly different end products, yet all three apply some of the same design principles when creating.

The game designer frequently references Doom and Stalker as some of his favorite games. This may be surprising, considering that Dear Esther feels like the antithesis of a fast-paced FPS. However, he didn't find it weird to make a game that feels slow. His reasoning was, some of his favorite parts in Doom or System Shock were the parts where you're not doing anything. The spaces between rooms full of chaingunners and archviles, exploring the environment, looking for secrets, were just as important as the rooms themselves. It came as a surprise to the team that both the writer and the game designer enjoyed the Stalker series, as well as Roadside Picnic, the book the series is based on. The feeling of desolation, of being in a place that you don't understand, was one of the main moods they wanted to portray in the game.

Some of their more interesting commentary on game design centered around the concept of systems. When designing a game, it can be easy to get stuck in this loop of modeling complexity. If this happens, you want this to happen, and that needs to be represented somehow in the game engine, right? But the important thing to realize is that, all a game boils down to is a player's perception of it. They have to feel that they are in the environment, and if elements of your system conflict with how they perceive it should be, it creates dissonance. So the choice to keep things as simple as possible was a conscious one.

A common misconception that many people have is to see simplicity as something that takes little effort. On the contrary; a simple, unified whole can be exceedingly more difficult to make than a complex mess. When your end result is something simple, all of its flaws are that more visible. Substantially more care needs to be put into every part, because every part is automatically under more scrutiny.

I'm going to quote the late Terry Davis here, because it feels more true to me every day. "An idiot admires complexity. A genius admires simplicity. If you make something so clusterfucked he can't understand it, he's going to think you're a god, because you made it so complicated that nobody can understand it." As an aspiring creative, I've recently learned to aim for simplicity, and it is difficult. The process of refining all of your ideas into one thing that's just enough is not easy, but it's worth doing. And if Dear Esther was worth my time for anything, it was worth it for greater understanding of that lesson. Neat/10

- niet