For this reason, over this new playthrough, I found myself increasingly disinterested in capturing the beautifully arranged landscapes the game reveals to you, and instead fascinated by the digital material of this object world. This is not a critique of the game’s accuracy, but more a recognition of how it is as much a representation of a game engine and its aesthetics as it is an analog of a real location in the world. It’s in the geology, the plants, the sand, in a thousand tiny details that feel disjointed from my memories and images of Eigg, Mull, Skye, and the scattered pieces of Orkney. It’s something that perhaps can only be picked up if you have, like me, spent much of your childhood on the windswept islands of Scotland. That’s the strange thing about Dear Esther that in many ways it does not more than passingly resemble a Hebridean island. The soft, flat light of the world, the tendency towards detailed, almost pointillist texturing, even the choice of props which was guided by Pinchbeck’s original selective use of existing Source assets. Briscoe admits that the game’s aesthetic and level structure was shaped by the engine’s limits and strengths, but even without his recognition of this, it is self evident in the game. In particular I found myself recognizing the traces of Valve’s Source Engine that lay across its world. That sense of Dear Esther as a cultural object, not a world or “alternate reality,” stuck with me as I returned to it for this column. The result is a wonderfully imperfect recreation of a vital cultural object. By doing this, Briscoe preserves Dear Esther‘s artistry rather than muddying it. It’s a laudable approach, and one that it would be good to see repeated elsewhere. Briscoe has returned to shift the 2012 version from the Source Engine to Unity, resisting the temptation to “visually upgrade” the game in any way. This year’s Dear Esther: L andmark Edition, surely the final form, is an equally restrained affair. It became a cultural island all of its own, a small but beautifully formed experiment that carefully laid out a piece of previously unexplored territory from pieces borrowed from the storied past of first-person games, and stripped everything but tone, emotion, and form.
#Dear esther series#
The resulting 2012 version demonstrated a mastery of light and form, its journey through a series of rhythmical spaces scored by the careful direction of Jessica Curry’s music and the reassuring warmth of Nigel Carrington’s voice. When level artist Rob Briscoe took on a graphical conversion of Dear Esther in 2009, he brought a further layer of delicacy to its world. Briscoe preserves Dear Esther‘s artistry rather than muddying it
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