BA4: Game Design Document #15

Jess Plays Dear Esther (image heavy)

Dear Esther is an experimental first person adventure game developed by thechineseroom & Robert Briscoe released in 2012 (although originally it was released in 2008 as a free mod for the source engine). 

 

The reason I bought this to play and study for our project is because the game is entirely based upon exploration; there is no combat, fighting, puzzles, NPC’s…there isn’t much of anything really. Many critics and reviewers slated Dear Esther for not really being a game at all.  Our game is going to be incredibly exploration based and I thought it would be good to research a game which is purely exploration (as well as being first person). 

I completed Dear Esther in roughly 90 minutes so in that respect I wasn’t so impressed, I paid £6.99 for the game! But the more I thought about it the more I realised it was an incredibly original experience for me as well as having pretty graphics. I also got a lot of ideas with regards to how our first person game could play out gameplay wise as well as interesting techniques used for story telling. Dear Esther is constantly narrating a story to the player and that is exactly what we want to do in our game. 

I made notes as I was playing as well as taking screen shots to back up my work. Here they are! 
 

Environment

These will mainly benefit Olive in my team as she is in charge of environments but I spoke to her after playing Dear Esther and told her about how its environments change dramatically but still retain its realistic style. You will see what I mean with these screen shots & notes. 

•  Areas force the player to feel claustrophobic.
  

•  There is use of severely contrasting colours.
  
•  The environments change dramatically throughout the game.
  
•  The island has a strange eerie calm about it which is reflected through the environments; they aren't obviously “scary” but you feel unsettled.
  
•  Generally very empty areas of the world make you feel very alone.

   

Gameplay

Playing Dear Esther was a totally unique experience for me, I've never played a game like it. I am not sure if I love it or if I played it though for the good of my uni work and research but it was definitely original to me. Playing through really sparked off my imagination with regards on how to approach our game play mechanics. Here are my notes. 

•  You have a torch but you don’t see it, nor do you see your hands/body.
  

•  You don’t see your body when you look down, you appear to have no feet, this annoys me :P
  

• The game is more like an interactive story than a game, everything is narrated and told to you as you explore the world further.
  

• Not very much interaction with the world 9unfortunately) its more like an museum exhibition; look but do not touch. I even saw a book on the floor which I thought was important; it turned out to be a flat texture pasted onto the ground with no real significance :(
  

• There are multiple pathways for the player to choose to follow. It made me feel very anxious in case I was missing something crucial down another path and I was constantly looking back feeling anxious I was doing the wrong thing.
  

• There were pointless dead ends which I encountered; that’s exploration for you though!
  

• I was dropped into the game with no tutorials, nothing told me what to do nor did it teach me how to use items. My torch was an instant application which turned on every time I was in the dark. To figure out the buttons I had to manually go onto the button configuration and learn them that way.
  

• Flashbacks are used to tell the story of the game to you and sometimes you are even forced to re play them there an then (the underwater highway/car crash).
  

• You will always come across small areas which entice you to go over to them and these are usually story related.
  

• There are often notes, words and phrases dotted around the world which tell a story.
  

• The player is constantly left to fill in the blanks and the whole story isn't complete until the end of the game.

  

Atmosphere

The atmosphere in Dear Esther is magical. I went in not really knowing anything about the game and I thought it was just going to be me walking around this pretty island. Well, I was right, however the islands has this weird way of appearing calm and incredibly eerie at the same time. From what I was being told through the narration to the cold chilling ambient noises the game made which were more prominent that my own footsteps; I was creeped out to say the lest. 

•  Often there would be some music crop up when I would approach a significant area of the world, this music was lovely but also hollow, it made me feel  more uncomfortable than anything and this was because of the settings of the world.
  
•  The man narrating the story to me has a very calm natural voice and thus makes me feel very distilled when listening to him, I am almost paranoid of him and it makes me feel nervous. A very eerie calm voice is 1 thing but some of the things he would say in this voice made me feel anxious.
  
•  The emptiness of the world and how alone I felt made the atmosphere of what would have been a beautiful island something completely different. It felt dark even though it was day time for a majority of the game, dark in tone, story and atmosphere. I felt uncomfortable because I almost felt like I was being watched.
  
• There were areas where all I had was my torch and I would be inside ram shacked buildings which looked like they hadn't been touched in years, this was definitely unsettling for me. I didn’t know why I was there or if I was alone.