Dear Esther
Winner, Best World/Story 2009
“I’ve begun my voyage in a paper boat without a bottom; I will fly to the moon in it. I have been folded along a crease in time, a weakness in the sheet of life. Now, you’ve settled on the opposite side of the paper to me; I can see your traces in the ink that soaks through the fibre, the pulped vegetation. When we become waterlogged, and the cage disintegrates, we will intermingle. When this paper aeroplane leaves the cliff edge, and carves parallel vapour trails in the dark, we will come together.”
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"It's testament to the phenomenal writing that a story with so little definition still manages to bring a tear to the eye with its heady weight. I don't know if there's ever been a title to achieve this before." Honest Gamers
"Last year, a Half-Life 2 mod changed my outlook on games forever... Dear Esther rejects pretty much every notion of what videogames should do, and instead presents a profound look at what they /could/ be doing. They could be telling stories that, while unforgiving and upsetting, exist within a format that no novel or film could ever reproduce." Rock, Paper, Shotgun
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A deserted island... a lost man... memories of a fatal crash... a book written by a dying explorer. Dear Esther is a ghost story told using first-person gaming technologies. Rather than traditional gameplay, the focus here is on exploration, uncovering the mystery of the island, of who you are and why you are here. Fragments of story are randomly triggered by moving around the environments, making every telling unique. Features a stunning, specially commissioned soundtrack. Forget the normal rules of play; if nothing seems real here, it's because it may just be all a delusion. What is the significance of the aerial - What happened on the motorway - is the island real or imagined - who is Esther and why has she chosen to summon you here? The answers are out there, on the lost beach and the tunnels under the island. Or then again, they may just not be, after all...
Dear Esther was launched in June 2008 and has been downloaded over 25,000 times. It has been selected for exhibition at E3 (Los Angeles), GameCity (Nottingham, UK) and the presitgious Ars Electronica exhibition 2008 (Linz, Austria). The music was selected for an honary mention at the 2008 international Machinima awards, and the mod made ModDB's 2008 Mod of the Year Top 100.
Dear Esther was created as part of thechineseroom's ongoing development-led research into first-person gaming, originally funded through the Arts & Humanities Research Council's speculative research grant programme.
The mod can be downloaded here.
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"A wildly original piece of storytelling" PC Zone
"The quality of the voice acting and script are far beyond what you’d expect...the music also is of startlingly high quality for such a small project, and complements the narration in building the atmosphere and sense of place for each of the island’s locations." Game Central
"Offers players a radically new approach to traditional RPGs and first-person games." TGDaily |
