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This is not to say that there aren't shocks, or twists. For once, you are not steering a space marine or action hero, but a lonely man with a broken leg, slowly negotiating a small, cold world. Trudge into a building, and your torch will automatically light up. Trudge into a cave, and your character will duck automatically. The dominant action of Dear Esther is trudging.
#Dear esther for mac series
Even the jump button, used by impatient players to speed across the landscape of the original release in an atmosphere-breaking series of bunny hops, has been removed. There are no fights, no thrills and no enemies. Looking at it, it is hard to believe that this is the product of a microstudio rather than a name-brand developer.īut back to the game, or the lack thereof. By keeping the game relatively short and the map relatively small, Pinchbeck and Briscoe have been able to lavish detail on the environment. This is actually the only aesthetic fault I could reasonably find. Since much of the game is spent trudging through ferns and Highland grasses, this means that the foliage, if you are looking at it while turning, turns to follow you in a disconcerting fashion. This is actually responsible for one minor frustration: foliage in Source is two-dimensional - either a single plane or two flat planes slotted together at right-angles, like a cardboard Christmas tree. Nonetheless, for all that, is Dear Esther interesting not just as an investment story, but as a game?ĭear Esther is, inarguably, a game engine - the action is driven by Valve Software's Source engine. The Indie Fund is a relatively new organisation, but this is a feather in its cap. This success joins the rush of indie developers towards Kickstarter and the emergence of the independent patron as a demonstration that the right funding model, coupled with the right market approach, can rapidly repay investments in the game space. "The fact that a title like Dear Esther can be a Steam top-seller, trend on Twitter and shift units in this quantity is really amazing and we're incredibly pleased," Pinchbeck told me by email. Expected to be a niche success, instead Dear Esther was the top-selling game of the day, with 16,000 sales - a 200% return on the Indie Fund's investment. And, on Valentine's Day, it arrived on Steam, where it promptly covered its costs in five and a half hours.
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This project mutated from an updated mod to a full conversion, funded with a $55,000 grant from the Indie Fund (a fund driven by seven successful indie game developers). The caves are a tour de force by Briscoe. Why is the island covered in luminous graffiti of chemical symbols? Why does the number 21 keep recurring? If I am alone on this island, who dropped that paper boat into the river?
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A syphilitic historian's account of the barren landscape. Stories spill out about the island and its sole inhabitant. As the exploration of the island progresses, the letters become more lyrical, looping and, arguably, loopy. What am I doing on this island? Who is this Esther I am writing letters to? As the character - disembodied as all first-person shooter characters are, but almost without physical presence, unable to run, jump, climb, shoot or perform any of the usual activities associated with the genre - traverses the hostile landscape, readings from his letters to Esther are triggered by the sight of a shipwrecked tanker, a flashing buoy or a crumbling bothy*. There is a puzzle, though, and a quest of sorts. It's not a large island, and most of it is (realistically) inaccessibly rocky.
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The only real challenge is working out where on the remote Hebridean island on which your character is stranded to go next. Is it an adventure? There is neither combat nor conversation.