![]() ![]() ![]() Dear Esther draws heavily on the techniques of horror: thickly textured environments, dim light, distant glimpses, slow introduction of off-kilter elements. #Dear esther analysis series#Comparisons to Myst are easy (the Myst series set and reset that bar how many times? Four generations running?) but I would rather call survival horror onto the stage. Dear Esther is the bar for next-generation immersive environmental gaming. None of this would work if the game were not beautiful, and of course it is beautiful. This pattern occurs at focal points, buildings or landmarks of detail - not at mere dead ends.) Again, a map analysis would just call it a simple bend in the path, but the experience is of discovering a new choice and trying it. (Or perhaps you saw it, but passed by because the area was more interesting. You missed it on the way in because of the angle of view. In a couple of places you advance into an area, explore it, find no way to continue, turn around, and see a second path by the entrance. (You could instead have turned around and descended the path, or scrambled deliberately down the slope.) But you have acted in the game and gotten a surprising result, and that's an interaction - choice and outcome. This is inevitable, it's just shaped terrain. But the ledge is too narrow you slip down to the beach and cannot climb back up. Smaller moments: you try to edge around a gap in the path, in order to continue up to the top of the hill. The paths join up again eventually, and you're always going to wind up in the next chapter, but this is de-emphasized the game's sense is that you are exploring freely. High or low, into a cave or down the beach, towards a building or up a slope. Much of the game uses this pattern, and the choices are always distinctive. You will not (unless you thrash hard against the game's intentions) see everything in your first run-through. (They left out the run button for a reason, see?) Moving into new territory is always the best-rewarded move, and therefore your choice of path is a choice. Worse: given the game's sedate walking pace, it's slightly frustrating. Precisely because the game lacks keys, switches, stars, and 1ups, it has no implicit mandate to explore every inch of territory. There are no game-mechanics associated with the choice, and a plot-diagram analysis would call them "the same place" - you can try either, back up, and go the other way. You walk along the beach a path goes up the bluff, another along the strand. So, given this interface, whence interactivity in Dear Esther? I say: from an understated but deadly-precise sense of attention design through spatial design. (Okay, you can hold down a mouse button to zoom in a little, but this didn't add anything for me and gave a weirdly non-mimetic FOV-zoom effect, so I avoided it.) Dear Esther is the elusive zero-button game. But it does - despite the absolute lack of any verbs besides "walk" and "look around". I might still hedge if the thing didn't come off as an interactive experience. It turns up regularly in the IFComp I've committed it myself. But at this point, "semi-hallucinatory journey across a lonely landscape with background story" is an established game genre. Two decades ago I was hedging and calling things like Gadget "interactive movies" rather than "games". ![]()
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