Dear Esther (PC, 2012)

"Dear Esther, the gulls do not land here anymore.  I've noticed that this year, they seem to shun the place.  Maybe it's the depletion of the fishing stock driving them away.  Perhaps it's me.  When he first landed here, Donnelly wrote that the herds were sickly and their shepherds the lowest of the miserable classes that populate these Hebridean islands.  Three hundred years later, even they have departed."

So begins Dear Esther (2012), with your character narrating one of the letters he has written to a woman named Esther.  Who exactly is she?  This is the first of many mysteries that surround this amazing game.  Your character is stranded on an island, which has obviously seen human activity before.  There is a radio tower that blinks faintly in the distance, and he is evidently living inside of a decaying lighthouse.  Whether he came to the island by choice or by accident is irrelevant; his boat has crashed upon its shore, and he is now lost to it.

This game is one of the most beautiful I have ever seen.  Originally a modification of Half-Life 2 using the Source engine (developed by independent studio The Chinese Room), this 2012 commercial release of the game is essentially an HD expansion.  The island is gorgeously drawn, reminding me of the grassy beaches of Cape Cod, and the rock formations around northern Michigan.  There is a caves section of the game which blew me away with its grandeur and beauty.  Stalactites and stalagmites create a spiderweb of rock, and water drips from them into cloudy pools on the ground.

So what is the gameplay like?  Well, I wouldn't call this a game to play, more of one to experience.  All you do is explore the island, taking in its majesty, and also collecting clues to a greater mystery.  There are no enemies to fight, there are no puzzles to solve.  There has been a lot of debate as to whether or not Dear Esther can be called a video game.  A critic at Destructoid criticized the game heavily for its minimal level of interaction, calling it "W Key: The Game" (the key that you hold to walk forward).  So, why should you play this game?  Sounds pretty boring.  "Au contrair," I say.  I think that the inclusion of obstacles in this game would be detrimental and jarring to its real purpose:  an intellectual puzzle.

The most interesting part of a mystery is in the solving of it, not the explanation.  Dear Esther knows this, and even in its beautiful final act and conclusion (which I dare not spoil for you) it only raises more questions.  But they are satisfying questions which hold great incentive for the player to re-experience the game multiple times.  Why am I here?  Who is Esther?  Are there any other intelligent beings on this island?  The game offers no explanations, but gives a substantial amount of clues.

From the first moments of the game there is mystery.  Going inside of the lighthouse, you will find that someone has been there also, who has painted the molecule of an alcohol on the wall.  This has thematic relevance, revealed later by one of the character's brilliantly written and acted narrations (done by Nigel Carrington).  He speaks of how Esther died in an automobile accident, and that it was caused by a drunken man whose memory torments the narrator.

The narrator also quotes from the only thing he has in his possession, a book by the cartographer, Donnelly, who came to the island in the 18th century to map the island, and chart the history of its original inhabitant, a hermit named Jakobson.  Donnelly discovered that the hermit came to the island in search of pure solitude, but eventually succumbed to an injury to his leg.  The narrator has also sustained a broken leg, so now he is going to cross the island to complete what Donnelly started, and find his absolution.

More wall paintings are discovered in seaside caves.  Depictions of neurons, nerve endings, more molecular structures.  Eventually symbols from electrical diagrams start popping up, and then whole circuit diagrams.  A painting of five "male" symbols suggests that the painters were five men.  One of the most intriguing pieces of evidence is a congregation of monolithic boulders obviously not set by nature.  In the center, found on the ground, is a chemistry textbook lying next to a copy of the Holy Bible.  These other people were chemists/electricians, but were they also religious?

Religious themes recur throughout the game.  Walking along the beach, the narrator comes across the rotting remains of a ship, only the skeleton is left.  The mast of the ship has come to resemble a cross sitting lonely in the sand.  In the caves, you will find this scrawled on the wall:  "BEHOLD, DAMASCUS IS TAKEN".  If you look carefully, you will find "Acts 22:0" written, and after I looked it up, it made sense.  Acts 22 of the Bible tells of the conversion of Paul the Apostle, his sermon at the city of Damascus (which apparently fell upon deaf ears), and then his arrest.  Perhaps the chemists, after being lost on the island for so long, have turned to religion to comfort them, and now want to convert anyone else who finds the remains of their micro-society.

Dear Esther is a fairly short game, beatable in about fifty minutes if you rush through it, but that is missing the point entirely.  If you stop to look around, collect evidence, and solve the island's mystery you will find an intellectual experience that will linger with you far beyond your completion of it.  This is also the first game that brought me nearly to tears.  The build up to and the conclusion of the game is one of the most emotional and gratifying moments in video gaming that I have experienced.  If we are to accept video games as a legitimate form of art, then this game is an example of the kind of magnum opus that the media can produce.