Dear Esther
- melkagen
- Apr 12, 2017
- 2 min read
This image does no justice to how beautiful Dear Esther is. If the point of walking sims is to immerse you in a gorgeous environment through which you move and explore, Dear Esther achieves that goal in spades. The fragmented quality of the story mimics the way one thinks while walking, too—mostly you're looking around at things, occasionally a thought comes into your head (although rarely is it as gorgeously written as the narrator's mini-monologues), then you fall back into contemplative mental silence and focus on the sound of wind or the feel of the grass.
Early German thinkers of the flâneur conceived of the practice as reading the city through the feet, like the city were a book. Ludwig Börne wrote in his 1824 Schilderungen aus Paris that the French capital was "an unfolded book...wandering through its streets means reading. In this instructive and delightful work, illustrated in such plenitude with images true to nature, I browse every day for several hours" (Qtd in Anke Gleber, The Art of Taking a Walk, p.10). Dear Esther, the first widely acknowledged walking sim, takes this principle seriously and creates a book made of space. One turns its pages by physically moving through it. Of course (and to my mind fascinatingly) one traverses the "book" of Dear Esther with the same mechanism as one would traverse a printed copy of its text—with several fingers. Walking in Dear Esther is accomplished through using the left hand fingers to press W, A, S, or D, while the right hand manipulates the mousepad to control the view. The voiceover text begins at seeming random, triggered by where you decide to move your (invisible) character.
I don't really know or care what, exactly, happened to Esther. Perhaps I should care more, but that doesn't seem like the point. There was a car accident and she died. The narrator seems to feel immense guilt about it, maybe because he was drunk (?), maybe because he was driving (?), but the deep truth is that she's dead and he can't go on living. Whether she was his wife or his daughter or someone else entirely, the piece is there to illustrate her loss. People talk online about the mystery (who is lighting all those candles? What is the narrator's connection to the island??) like we're in a playable version of Shutter Island, but I couldn't bring myself to care about this like a detective story. Esther is gone and he cannot bear it; he walks the island like a ghost, like a pilgrim, in horrible pain from a broken leg and high on percocet. His walking is not to discover anything; he knows too much, he doesn't want to discover anything else. I found it easy to fall into that. The game is disinterested in completionism. If you read the entire text, you find out a few more details, but it doesn't much change your experience because the piece is not a mystery; it's a dirge.
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