Dear Esther: bizarre, touching Half Life 2 mod

Jim from Rock Paper Shotgun sez, "We recently posted up this piece by upcoming games critic Lewis Denby. It's about Dear Esther a bizarre Half-Life 2 modification set on an abandoned island. The mod itself is fascinating because of the slow, poetic style and superb narration - the designer Dan Pinchbeck describes it as a "interactive ghost story" - and it's more like a piece of fiction read with a mouse and keyboard than any trad horror-game. But what's interesting to me is the way it provoked Denby to examine the response of gamers to the mod, and how it changed his personal comprehension of what games could or should be doing."

If you're looking for fun, I've no idea why you're playing Dear Esther in the first place. This is fearless, classical tragedy. It ends with the sound of a heart monitor flatlining, for goodness' sake. Lead designer Dan Pinchbeck describes it as "an interactive ghost story," but the inevitable connotations of that are misleading. This isn't about bumps in the night or any other hackneyed horror archetypes. It's deep, heart-tugging, emotional trauma. Dear Esther is indeed ghostly and ethereal, but it's all thematic notation. Really, the only horror is in realising how truly heartbreaking this tale is.

Some people will tell you it's not a game. Depending on your definitions, maybe it isn't. You play as... well, that's never revealed, and since it's all in uninterrupted first-person, you've no way of finding out. During your time on what initially appears to be a remote Hebridean island, a disembodied voice will read fragments of a series of letters, written to a woman named Esther who we're never introduced to. And you'll explore, climbing higher and higher up the mountain in the centre, piecing together the proverbial puzzle and trying to establish, often in vain, just what this place is.

Touched By The Hand Of Mod: Dear Esther (Thanks, Jim!)

• [Yeroc]

  “I’ll be buying Half-Life 2 so I can play this mod.”

  You don’t have HL2 (and episodes already)? Do yourself a huge favour and buy the Orange Box. Now. HL2 etc is certainly my favourite game(s) ever, and they just get better.

  “I just watched the video on the linked site. Is that the same as “playing” the “game”?”

  Kinda, I watched the video after playing Dear Ester, I didn’t really have the same feel. Video was too choppy, and part of Dear Ester is the pacing – slow, but on purpose. The lulls are good, it gives time to think and try and figure out just what the hell is going on. And just the feel of exploring and kinda interacting with the environment is missing in the vid.

• [dderidex]

  If you do end up buying HL2, as noted, do so as part of the ‘Orange Box’.

  HL2, as a game – well, it’s a shooter, of course, but tells an amusingly engaging (for a shooter) post-apocalyptic kind of tale. Complete with mysterious figures whose motivation you don’t fully understand, uncertain origin, etc.

  Also, it has ‘Portal’ on it, which is a puzzle shooter, and perhaps the most engaging game ever made. The dry humor in it is DELIGHTFUL.

  Anyway, it also means you’ll need to install Steam (which is how Valve distributes their games). Reason that is significant is that a LOT of indie developers are using Steam as a great way to get their games out to the public without having to go through one of the mega-publishers dominating the market right now. As an example, another available game on Steam The Path, has been getting very good comments as a similar type of ‘slow story/art piece’ that the ‘Dear Esther’ in the above article is.

• [HPHovercraft]

  Is there some literary or cultural significance to the phrase ‘Dear Esther’? I only ask because as I was reading up on this mod an old Chuck Mosely-era Faith No More track came up in my shuffle (‘Crab Song’), and ‘Dear Esther’ is spoken softly over the song’s intro.

  Probably nothing more than a (slightly eerie) coincidence, but I thought I’d check.

• [God45]

  This is like a 3d interactive visual novel. I hope the guys who play this go on to do other visual novels such as Umineko, Fate Stay Night, and Katawa Shoujo.

• [Anonymous]

  Weird, I can’t install it. I’ve put it in the SourceMod folder, along with the other mods, but it doesn’t appear in the Steam games list…

  Other people on the net seem to have the same problem, but I can’t solve this.

• [Anonymous]

  As far as getting it to pop up in your steam games list, I just followed the instructions on the FAQ posted on Portal Prelude’s site, modified accordingly – I’m running a mac and I had to go into the terminal to get it to come up. I don’t know if that’ll work for you. It at least got it running on my system.

• [Anonymous]

  @usegobos

  My thoughts exactly.

  The only game franchise that ever shook me to the bone was MYST, and I’ve waited for the industry to reconsider what made it great.

  I’ll be buying Half-Life 2 so I can play this mod.

  (The Captcha reads “important mixture”– I couldn’t have put it better myself.)

• [Anonymous]

  I just watched the video on the linked site. Is that the same as “playing” the “game”?

  Quite pretty and atmospheric, though a lot of it is like Olivier’s Oscar speech.

• [Yeroc]

  I loved Dear Ester – Creepy, atmospheric, a bit sad too. Not one for the impatient as the game certainly moves at its own pace, but it feels right.

• [RadioGuy]

  It ends with the sound of…

  Probably minor, but, um, spoilers much?

• [usegobos]

  “set on an abandoned island. The mod itself is fascinating because of the slow, poetic style and superb narration – the designer Dan Pinchbeck describes it as a “interactive ghost story” – and it’s more like a piece of fiction read with a mouse and keyboard than any trad horror-game.”

  That sounds familiar. It’s about time they took a crowbar to the Selentic age.

• [caldrax]

  Strange, it sounds a LOT like a concept me and a friend conceived as an Unreal Tournament mod back in the day but never actually got around to creating. I’ll have to download it and give it a shot.

• [Yeroc]

  Yeah, there was a bit of unfortunate spoiler in this post …

• [Anonymous]

  You’re Esther, you’re in the hospital dying and the note is being read to you as you hallucinate/travel to the afterlife.

  Never played it, just guessing.