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But, he adds, “there's nowhere to hide in a game like Esther.” For me, that feeling manifested as an almost headlong rush towards the end, wanting to escape this world where the narrator’s maudlin, Richard Burton-esque tones, were enveloping me in dark feelings I wanted to flee from. “There's a bit of an illusion of simplicity with games like Dear Esther that people kind of assume, because there's not a lot of mechanics, there's not much going on in that sense,” says director Dan Pinchbeck in the commentary. The chill of the game sets in when that fact slowly dawns on you, when you realize just what it is you’re exploring. In Dear Esther’s case, the protagonist literally painted his pain across the island, as the fragments of his letters slowly reveal his solitude on the island, combined with his obsessive grief over his wife’s passing, drove him mad. You are alone, instead, with memories, ghosts, and reflections. What solitary games like this do is force you to dwell in a character’s psyche this, in the end, becomes the point of “lonely games,” a notion that is nearly synonymous with “walking simulator” as most such games are entirely devoid of other visible, active characters. In time, you realize that the island is the protagonist and vice versa past its time, a touch pretentious, enfolding sorrow and beauty in equal measure. The interactivity was limited entirely to your agency in advancing the unfolding narrative through motion that, like modern art installations, immersed you in experiences like trauma and rebirth. To look back is to realize that Esther, in its runaway success, gave permission to developers to pare down the interactive experience until it was as clean as a bone, to a paraphrase James Baldwin.
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Jessica Curry, Rob Briscoe, and Dan Pinchbeck recording commentary Esther: A Ghost Story The emergent theme, which says so much about the nature of this slow-paced, ethereal game-and, indeed the whole "walking simulator" genre-grows out of Pinchbeck's assertion that "the player's imagination is the most powerful thing you've got in your design kit." Such games compel the developer to reach into the mind of the player like never before.
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Many focused on the environmental storytelling of the game and are worth a listen for any game developer. Writer Dan Pinchbeck, Composer Jessica Curry, and Artist Rob Briscoe were reunited for the first time in many years to provide developer's commentary for the Landmark Edition, with audio snippets spread throughout the island that you activate by walking through them. Clearly it was on the minds of the developers as well.