This is a brief analysis of the game Dear Esther I wrote a little while back but forgot to publish, originally meant for a website I contribute to novede.com. I wanted to have a go at breaking down it’s elements and how the game works to motivate the player to try and give it a little more credit as a ‘game’.

Dear Esther is an experimental game/visual novel by UK development team The Chinese Room. It’s solemn and poetic, but somewhat controversial amongst players as to whether it should be called a game or not due to it’s stark lack of ‘features’. This isn’t rhetoric meant to persuade you but I’d like to break down the few techniques and mise-en-scene as it were that act within it.

We open standing on a small stone jetty extending over a small pebbly beach, looking parallel to the island’s coast into the misty hills in the distance with a single red light blinking in and out high up in the mists on the top of a radio tower. We think little of it, assuming it’s simply a set piece of the island, yet sparking a hint of curiosity, “What’s that light doing there?”. The player will look to their right – the presence of a coastline suggests nothing but an empty ocean view to the left – to look for clues pertaining to the goal of this game. We see a bottomless rowboat washed up on the pebbly beach, and a decrepit beach house, junk strewn in and around it. This is a strangely unremarkable scene, and upon finding naught but the dull green meadows, brown sands, and grey mists of the island surroundings, and the blinking red light suddenly becomes a much more enticing curio, a salvation from the dull environment around us; we realise that this is where we’re meant to go, nay, where we want to go.

In this Dear Esther demonstrates a simple but timelessly powerful tool: using clear, even contrasting signs or signals to lead and motivate a player to continue through a game. While Dear Esther offers by no means an open world, the restrictive nature of the island’s paths are quickly forgotten with the motivation of a hugely powerful emotion; curiosity.

Source: GameInformer

Silence as well is rarely considered a call to action. We usually find that musical cues, characters, or environmental happenings invoke action in the player, prompting them to either approach and engage with the action or try to escape it. In Dear Esther’s case the pervasive silence is unnerving from the very opening of the game’s main menu – sound is a natural occurrence, hence silence is eerie – and naturally a player will want to break the silence as soon as possible. Thus, coupled with the visual tease of the blinking light, our desire to journey into curiosity is amplified.

Certainly, the poetic passages read by the haunted voice of Nigel Carrington build a tauntingly shattered narrative throughout the game – one that asks players to make their own meaning of it – but it remains that the small red light was the only catalyst necessary to initiate that narrative.

Fellow writer at novede.com Harrison Engstrom made some great points regarding game design in his article 50 Things I Learnt Playing Half Life 2: Episode 1, one point in particular noted that, “If something is important, make sure it stands out” and in Dear Esther this holds very true.

I’ve had my fair share of arguments with friends over whether Dear Esther is a game or not, but like many experimental media in the past, it doesn’t set out to enact the full experience set with explosions, an entire set of characters, a huge open world, or even sensical dialogue. Dear Esther takes a handful of elements that comprise any given game like the signs that entice a player to move the narrative forward, or the clues laden throughout the world and sporadic monologues, executing them in a succinct and refined way. At that, the whole experience only lasts an hour or two depending on how long you indulge in the game’s various areas which is dismal playtime compared to the shelves of titles that insist on 10-20 hour stories, but Dear Esther serves itself as a compact experience, one that isn’t meant to last you more than a week, but one that explains in greater detail the potency of well crafted elements.