Dear Esther

Dear Esther’s story is told by enigmatic voice messages that eventually contradict themselves, causing disorientation and confusion. Its setting is eerie, enveloped by a dreamlike atmosphere that rejects common logic. It’s a fascinating game that only falters when it tries too hard to make us replay it.

The gameplay in Dear Esther could not be simpler. Our character is stuck on an island and the only possible action is to walk and observe the scenery, moving the camera – we can’t even pick up objects to observe them. This means that, at the beginning of the game, we’re encouraged to observe our surroundings, try to discover where we are, and search for a goal ourselves – a blinking red light at the top of a tower on the horizon may offer a clue, for example. And while we traverse the island, we hear a narration: a man describing that landscape to a woman named Esther, taking the opportunity to comment on the problems inherent to human nature and the consequences of isolation.

The elaborate language used in the narration serves to hide plot details amidst an ocean of metaphors, although the quality of the writing can vary: it can sound poetic at times (“When you were born, your mother told me, a hush fell over the delivery room. No one knew what to say, so you cried to fill the vacuum. I always admired you for that; that you cried to fill whatever vacuum you found. I began to manufacture vacuums just to enable you to deploy your talent”), but only pretentious at others (“I return each time leaving fresh markers that I hope, in the full glare of my hopelessness, will have blossomed into fresh insight in the interim”).

The game’s first-person camera soon proves to be essential for the narrative, preventing us from discovering the identity of our character from the outset: since we can’t see our appearance, even the character’s gender remains hidden, being an important mystery that permeates the entirety of Dear Esther.

Some names are given to us – Paul, Donnelly, Jacobson – but those personalities soon start to blend together, indicating that some may even constitute the same person. The characteristics of the narrator are often compared with the geography of the island, too (“My rocks are these bones and a careful fence to keep the precipice at bay. Shot through me caves, my forehead a mount, this aerial will transmit into me so”), leaving us even more puzzled and wondering if the island’s nature is allegorical.

The thing is that the narrator is clearly not reliable: he is drowning in remorse, desperately trying to prevent guilt from filling his lungs and choking him to death, so his words are more concerned with expressing his pain and hiding his guilt than anything else. He’s an unhappy and melancholic figure who accompanies us throughout the whole island, commenting just sparingly on some prior events, withholding sensible information because some memories cause him a lot of pain.

The things we hear him say, however, are randomly chosen from a pool of options – a strange design decision that has both positive and negative effects on the narrative. On the one hand, it ensures variety by stimulating more than one visit to the island, and it allows each player to have a slightly different experience in their first playthrough. On the other, it affects cohesion and prevents more sophistication in the text. It can be difficult, for example, to establish a progression in the narrator’s mental state throughout the game if certain dialogues fail to appear – and without this progression, some of the story bits are lost. In addition to that, the text must also be a bit vague in order to fit in more than one situation.

Dear Esther, therefore, can be an unnecessarily laborious puzzle. It simply fails when it’s unable to deliver all the pieces needed to fully understand the story in a single playthrough, forcing us to replay the game in the hopes that the events will make more sense a second time around. The game’s very short length helps with that, but it’s one thing to encourage replaying the game with the promise of a new experience; another entirely to withhold information important to the understanding of the story. The first case is a reward-based incentive; the second is blackmail: play more than once our game or end with an unfinished experience.

It’s a pity because Dear Esther otherwise works splendidly. The art direction, for example, deserves applause for tapping into the allegorical nature of the island, transforming it into a fantastical, ethereal, and very personal place. The chemical formula of ethanol drawn on the walls and mountains, and the destroyed car pieces scattered throughout the place both suggest a very specific tragedy in the narrator’s life while also hinting at his obsessive personality. His relationship with Esther is charged with melancholy, being often recreated with touching visual metaphors: the letters that he never wrote to her, for example, appear folded in paper boats, sailing in the darkness of the night to eventually sink in the distance, creating a painful image that symbolizes the journey of our character on that island.

The atmosphere of solitude is claustrophobic. The island is deserted – we only see seagulls living there – although it contains several human constructions. The sound of the waves crashing against the steep cliffs, the strange messages painted on the stones, and the destroyed structures all contribute to our eagerness to escape from there as quickly as possible. We’re encouraged to feel like the narrator: anguished and alone. The level design forces us to walk in long spirals, to go back and forth on the island, circling the environments, making the setting shrink and expand uncannily. And there is no easy escape from there: when we try to jump off a cliff or drown in the sea, the character returns to the last safe spot on the ground accompanied by a single whisper begging them not to give up. The soundtrack composed by Jessica Curry, meanwhile, perfectly captures the somber mood of the game, trying to convey the desolation and sadness of that place.

Dear Esther’s atmosphere, marked by pain and anguish, is expertly built by the environments and the narration. Its ambitious and unique narrative, however, is only effective when the pieces of the puzzle finally come together. It’s a shame, then, that the developers decided to make this outcome a random event.

March 21, 2025.

Review originally published in Portuguese on May 20, 2015.