![]() I remembered nothing but water, stones in my belly and my shoes threatening to drag me under to where only the most listless of creatures swim. The morning after I was washed ashore, salt in my ears, sand in my mouth and the waves always at my ankles, I felt as though everything had conspired to this one last shipwreck. In one of the openings of the game, this corporality is emphasized.ĭear Esther. I have read theories which suggested all of this, but I want to argue that the island is a metaphor for Esther’s body. The overall consensus in most reviews on Steam, for instance, is that the island is a subconscious representation of traumatic events (the husband might be envisioning this in this hospital) or represents the after-life of the characters (Both Paul and Esther died in the car crash). Also, when the player drowns himself or falls of the cliffs, a short cut scene shows blurry, gray visuals and whispers “come back”. Should we take this literally or is it an allegory -a memory landscape or dream? It’s hard to see the island as a “real” setting. The player-character arrives there, but it is unclear what the island is. As the game proceeds, these different characters blend.įor any interpretation of Dear Esther, the island itself is a promising start. It remains unsure whether these characters are imagined or real. Paul, by the roadside, by the exit for Damascus, all ticking and cooled, all feathers and remorse, all of these signals routed like traffic through the circuit diagrams of our guts, those badly written boats torn bottomless in the swells, washing us forever ashore. This character, in particular, is a source of biblical references as he is compared to the apostle Paul on the road to Damascus. There’s a) the titular Esther, b) the cartographer Donnelly who charted the island c) the eighteenth-century shepherd and hermit Jakobson and finally, d) Paul, the drunk driver who killed Esther. His monologues focus on four characters, additionally to the unidentified narrator and the unidentified player-character. The voice-actor, Nigel Carrington, speaks in a solemn voice that suits the dense letters to Esther. As an experience, the game owes a great deal to its narration. Do we control Esther? Are we her husband, or even a sea gull traversing the land? It’s hard to give closure to rich virtual poem, but let’s pick up on some of the key themes!ĭear Esther is a walking simulator in which we can interact very little with our environment. The identity of this narrator and the player-character remain ambiguous throughout the game. Its melancholic atmosphere and attention for haunted landscapes, rife with past memories, quickly allow us to associate it with classic gothic fiction. Dear Esther can be interpreted as a modern ghost story. Set at an abandoned Hebridean island, the player explores a dark island. This walking simulator is rife with intertext and biblical references – a layer cake of potential meanings. ![]() Dear Esther is a remarkable, haunting game.
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