Has anyone else played this game? I did my first playthrough of it yesterday with no previous information about it except that it is an exploration game where a story gets told to you.
I was totally blown away. I recently played Proteus, which is also an exploration experience but with a completely different tone and no "story" to suss out. I couldn't stop thinking about Dear Esther all day yesterday afterwards.
I've recorded a full playthrough and will be working on editing and publishing it in four parts. Once that's done I plan on doing a full English major style textual analysis of the game. My [very] tentative idea is that the island represents different stages of grief. But that seems a bit too obvious? I have to go back and look at the narrations and do another playthrough (although I now know that some of the lines you get fed can vary, though others always pop up in the same places).
Basically, this game/experience has lodged itself in my brain and I can't stop picking at it. It seems like something hubski would enjoy and I want to hear other peoples' interpretations of Dear Esther.
I enjoyed it quite a bit but didn't apply any kind of rigid analysis to the experience. I played it right around the time it came out and honestly don't recall how different parts of it hit me but I remember that I was moved by the whole thing. I think it might be a good game for people who don't like games. I think my wife would like it and hope to get her to experience it sometime, she dislikes the competitive aspect of games generally. If you haven't played Jason Rohrer's 'Passage' you really should, it's free and only takes about 5-10 minutes to play. It really hit me in a way like Dear Esther but it's way more simple.
As already mentioned, definitely check out Rohrer's games. Well worth it. I've only played Dear Esther once completely through and enjoyed it immensely. I think there is certainly a lot of interpretation that can be put upon the sequence of stages in the game. Illuminous underground. Ascending upward. etc. The thing that stuck with me the most though is the plain fact that you are on an island. Which, this time around, is a solitary place. And suddenly, all experience is projected inward. I think that one could even suggest that because there was no one else on the island to witness the inevitable ending, it could even not have happened at all. And now that I say that, I wonder - Do we jump off ourselves, or do we simply throw him off - puppet master style?