Dear Esther immerses you in a…. Dear Esther Free Download A deserted island…a lost man…memories of a fatal crash…a book written by a dying explorer. Dear Esther immerses you in a stunningly realised world, a remote and desolate island somewhere in the outer Hebrides. Abandoning traditional gameplay for a pure story-driven experience, Dear Esther fuses its beautiful environments with a breathtaking soundtrack to tell a powerful story of love, loss, guilt and redemption.
What is the significance of the aerial — What happened on the motorway — is the island real or imagined — who is Esther and why has she chosen to summon you here?
The answers are out there, on the lost beach, the windswept cliffs and buried in the darkness of the tunnels beneath the island… Or then again, they may just not be, after all… Dear Esther is supported by Indie Fund. Every play-through a unique experience, with randomly generated audio, visuals and events. Explore Incredible environments that push the Source engine to new levels of beauty. Dear Esther is a haunting game.
Taking place entirely on a fictional island off the coast of Scotland, this walking simulator consists of exploring the island on which you find yourself while listening to letters written to a woman called Esther and occasionally catching glimpses of ghosts which seem to be following you. It is revealed as the game progresses that Esther met her end in a car crash, the fault of which lies with a drunk driver called Paul.
All the while, the story of what happened to Esther and the reason her husband who has penned the letters to which you are listening has gone to the island is intertwined with the story of Donnelly and Jakobson, former inhabitants of the island Dear Esther breaks traditional video game design in several ways. Poppy Playtime. Even other walking simulators such as a personal favourite of mine, Leaving Lyndow tell you, the player, who the character is that you are controlling.
Dear Esther does not do that. So who are you playing in Dear Esther. Details of her mysterious death are revealed as the player moves throughout the island. Stunning soundtrack featuring world-class musicians. An uncompromisingly inventive game delivered to the highest AAA standards. The gameplay in Dear Esther is minimal, with the only task being to explore an uninhabited Hebridean island, listening to an anonymous man read a series of letter fragments to his deceased wife, Esther.
As the player reaches new locations on the island, the game plays a new letter fragment relating to that area. Different audio fragments are revealed in each playthrough of the game, presenting a slightly different narrative each time.
Several other characters are referred to by the narrator: a man named Donnelly, who charted the island in the past; Paul, who is suggested to be the drunk driver in the accident in which Esther died; and a shepherd named Jakobson who lived on the island in the 18th century.
Blair Witch VR. As the player explores the island, they find the derelict remains of buildings, a shipwreck, and a cave system whose walls are adorned with images resembling chemical diagrams, circuit diagrams, neurons and bacteria. At various points a figure is seen walking away from the player in the distance, but disappears before they can be reached. As the game progresses, the identities of the characters become more blurred and the player is made to draw their own conclusions of the story.
Esther was born with a large birthmark across her face. According to the story the Narrator told, doctors were stunned into silence and she cried to fill the void. The birthmark had long since faded by the time the Narrator and Esther met. I think it is easy to assume that you are not Paul, Donnelly, or Jakobson. I returned home with a pocket full of stolen ash. Half of it fell out of my coat and. But the rest I carefully stowed away in a box I kept. It was never intended as a meaningful act but over.
In time, we will all be worn. From here I can see my armada. I folded you into the creases and then, as the. Shattered into twenty-one pieces, I consigned. You could trace the connections with your finger, join the dots.
There were chemical stains on the tarmac: the leak of air conditioning, brake fluid. He kept sniffing at his fingers as he sat by the roadside waiting as if he.
You could hear the sirens above the idling traffic. The pain in my leg sent me blind for a few minutes as I struggled up the cliff path: I. Through the fugue, it is all. I will drag my leg behind me; I will drag it like a crumpled hatchback, tyres blown and. I am running out of painkillers and. This cliff path is slippery in the dew; it is hard. I must carve out the bad flesh and sling it from the.
There are headlights reflected in these retinas, too long in the tunnels of my island. The sea creatures have risen to the surface, but the gulls are not.
I have become fixed: open and staring, an eye. I have become an infected leg, whose tracking lines form a perfect. I will take the exit at mid-thigh and plummet to my. I will break through the fog of these godforsaken pills and achieve clarity. There are twenty-one connections in the circuit. He was not drunk Esther, he was not drunk at all. He had not drunk with Donnelly or. His windscreen was not star-studded all.
His paintwork etched with circuit diagrams, strange. The phosphorescence of the skid marks lighting the M5 all. Blind with panic, deaf with the roar of the caged traffic, heart stopped on the road to.
I have dredged these waters for the bones of the hermit, for the traces of Donnelly,. He was not drunk Esther, he was not drunk at all, and it was.
The paint scored away from his car in lines, like an infection, making directly. I have burnt my belongings, my books, this death certificate. Mine will. I will look to my left and see Esther Donnelly, flying. I will look to my right and see Paul Jacobson, flying beside me. They will. I've been going through my PC scrubbing it ready to hand it over to a new staff member and founds loads of fun old archive stuff, including these notes for Dear Esther translators, which might be interesting for anyone still wondering about parts of the script This presents quite a challenge for you, I know, but if you can try and preserve it — particularly when two separate tenses are mixed within a single phrase or sentence — please do.
Another thing to watch for is collapsing symbols. Often a symbol or metaphor will be set-up to be collapsed either later on in the VO — usually by shifting the object being talked about into something completely different — or contradicted by a later VO.
In the first case, try and follow the logic of the metaphor, rather than trying to accurately tie it to the object if that makes sense. In the second case, the key thing is not to try and look backwards or forwards from each particular cue. The tone throughout remains very subdued and abstract.
There are instances where quite concrete ideas are being put out by the script, but more often, the point is more about trying to make these images and symbols compelling, not rational.
Think of the whole thing as a fever dream, or a voice coming through the static on a badly tuned radio. Another thing that might help is thinking about the whole thing as a kind of prayer or spell.
One thing that was more evident in the early stages of the mod was the idea that the narrator was literally trying to cast a spell to bring Esther back from the dead, there were lots more magical symbols and numerology in the game. Some of the voice-overs have a more explicit sense of this, but many of them do have this idea of an invisible audience. Who is he? He has no personality, no reality. Or he has several. We need to keep this soft and subtle. There are really two major interpretations of Dear Esther.
The first is quite literal: following the death of his wife in a car crash, the narrator has a nervous breakdown and strands himself on a deserted Hebridean island.
The isolation, starvation and an infection following a serious injury cause his mind to deteriorate further, and he begins to hallucinate, projecting symbols, figures and meanings onto the environment. Driven mad with pain and grief, he begins to believe that the only route to redemption is to commit suicide, by climbing and throwing himself off the radio mast at the summit of the island, transmitting the story of Esther's death to the world.
The second opens in a similar way, but around the beginning of the second level, the seed is sown that the island may not actually be a real space. The narrator starts to openly voice his eroded confidence in the reality of the world, and unnatural symbols and events become apparent in the landscape. As we descend into the caves, it becomes clearer that this is not a real space at all, and the island actually appears to be some form of coma-dream, a visualisation of the destroyed interior landscape of the narrator's mind.
In this case, everything begins to take on an altered significance: the act of throwing himself from a radio tower — does it mean redemption or waking from the coma, or an act of healing, of closure?
Somewhere, between the longitude and latitude a split opened up and it beached remotely here. No matter how hard I correlate, it remains a singularity, an alpha point in my life that refuses all hypothesis. I return each time leaving fresh markers that I hope, in the full glare of my hopelessness, will have blossomed into fresh insight in the interim.
The alpha point refers to the religious idea of god being the alpha and the omega, the beginning and end of all things, next to the scientific idea of singularity i.
When he first landed here, Donnelly wrote that the herds were sickly and their shepherds the lowest of the miserable classes that populate these Hebridean islands. Three hundred years later, even they have departed. I have lost track of how long I have been here, and how many visits I have made overall.
Certainly, the landmarks are now so familiar to me that I have to remind myself to actually see the forms and shapes in front of me. I could stumble blind across these rocks, the edges of these precipices, without fear of missing my step and plummeting down to sea. The idea of a cycle is important here, that the player is given the sense this is all a repeat. 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.
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. Allegedly, he rowed here from the mainland in a boat without a bottom, so all the creatures of the sea could rise at night to converse with him.
How disappointed he must have been with their chatter. They say he threw his arms wide in a valley on the south side and the cliff opened up to provide him shelter; they say he died of fever one hundred and sixteen years later. The shepherds left gifts for him at the mouth of the cave, but Donnelly records they never claimed to have seen him. I have visited the cave and I have left my gifts, but like them, I appear to be an unworthy subject of his solitude. So this introduces the historical narrative, which is a false clue really.
There was another plotline originally which I still have in my head, that the island has always had a hermit, someone who comes for the complete solitude. Donnelly became one, and initially, the narrator sets himself up to be one. This is before we find out about the other historical inhabitant of the island — Jakobson.
So maybe there's this binary — are you a hermit, or a dead shepherd — which then leads to the question of which one the narrator is, and what these archetypes they really were deliberately thought of as archetypes represent — if anything.
From up on the cliffs they are mundane, but down here they fugue into ambiguity. For instance, I cannot readily tell if they belong above or below the waves.
The distinction now seems mundane; why not everything and all at once! A fugue is a short-term period of amnesia — someone in a fugue can move around, etc, but is not really conscious of their actions and cannot remember them. So we have this idea of the island drifting in and out of reality, of being a dreamlike space. The sea, they said, is too rough for the turbines to stand: they clearly never came here to experience the becalming for themselves. Personally, I would have supported it; turbines would be a fitting contemporary refuge for a hermit: the revolution and the permanence".
A great red birthmark covered the left side of your face. No one knew what to say, so you cried to fill the vacuum. I always admired you for that; that you cried to fill whatever vacuum you found.
I began to manufacture vacuums, just to enable you to deploy your talent. The birthmark faded by the time you were six, and had gone completely by the time we met, but your fascination with the empty, and its cure, remained. I wash the sand from my lips and grip my wrist ever more tightly, my shaking arms will not support my fading diaries.
He landed on the south side of the island, followed the path to bay and climbed the mount. He did not find the caves and he did not chart the north side. I think this is why his understanding of the island is flawed, incomplete. He stood on the mount and only wondered momentarily how to descend. So here we're getting the idea that there is or was a historically real island, but it has been almost psychically overlaid with this new reality; also that the narrator may have been following Donnelly once, but this is not about Donnelly, it's gone beyond that.
Perhaps it is fitting that my only companion in these last days should be a stolen book written by a dying man. Of course, the irony here is that the narrator could be describing himself, and what the player is hearing and experiencing.
I find myself easily slipping into the delusional state of ascribing purpose, deliberate motive to everything here. Was this island formed during the moment of impact; when we were torn loose from our moorings and the seatbelts cut motorway lanes into our chests and shoulders, did it first break surface then? First potential mention of the crash, fusion of the white lines which may be visible with seatbelt damage.
This is the most 'active' of the three cues possible, it actually gives quite a lot away about what is going on. The moon cresting the junction between the cliff path and the stone circle. It cast a shadow of the ridge across the beach, all the world as if you had signed your name across the sand in untidy handwriting. This may come back later on too. With the right eyes you could see them from the mainland or the fishing boats and know to send aid or impose a cordon of protection, and wait a generation until whatever pestilence stalked the cliff paths died along with its hosts.
My lines are just for this: to keep any would-be rescuers at bay. The infection is not simply of the flesh. They really did this — found it in a historical report and just loved it.
It was stolen by a visiting monk in , two years before the island was abandoned altogether. In the interim, I wonder, did they assign chapter and verse to the stones and grasses, marking the geography with a superimposed significance; that they could actually walk the bible and inhabit its contradictions?
No tired old man parting the cliffs with his arms; no gifts or bibles laid out on the sand for the taking. No tides turning or the shrieking gulls overhead. The bones of the hermit are no longer laid out for the taking: I have stolen them away to the guts of this island where the passages all run to black and there we can light each others faces by their strange luminescence".
I have now spent three days in their company that is, I fear, enough for any man not born amongst them. Despite their tedious inclination to quote scripture, they seem to me the most godforsaken of all the inhabitants of the outer isles. Indeed, in this case, the very gravity of that term — forsaken by god — seems to find its very apex. Did he include himself in that, I wonder?
I met Paul. I made my own little pilgrimage. My Damascus a small semi-detached on the outskirts of Wolverhampton. We drank coffee in his kitchen and tried to connect to one another. Responsibility had made him old; like us, he had already passed beyond any conceivable boundary of life.
I transferred my belongings from the bothy on the mount and tried to live here instead. It was cold at night and the sea lapped at the entrance at high tide. To climb the peak, I must first venture even deeper into veins of the island, where the signals are blocked altogether. Only then will I understand them, when I stand on the summit and they flow into me, uncorrupted. I would leave you loaves and fishes, but the fish stocks have been depleted and I have run out of bread.
I would row you back to your homeland in a bottomless boat but I fear we would both be driven mad by the chatter of the sea creatures. Hope that makes sense?!? We are woven into a sodden blanket, stuffed into the bottom of a boat to stop the leak and hold back the ocean.
My neck aches from staring up at the aerial; it mirrors the dull throb in my gut where I am sure I have begun to form another stone. Why, asked the farmers, why asked Jakobson, why bother with your visions at all, if you are just to throw your arms up at the cliff and let it close in behind you, seal you into the belly of the island, a museum shut to all but the most devoted.
I walked up the cliff path in near darkness and camped in the bay where the trawler lies beached. It was only at dawn that I saw the bothy and decided to make my temporary lodgings there. I was expecting just the aerial and a transmitter stashed in a weatherproof box somewhere on the mount.
It had an air of uneasy permanence to it, like all the other buildings here; erosion seems to have evaded it completely. They were open, so anyone can take refuge in them normally shepherds etc. To think they once grazed animals here, the remnants of occupation being evidence to that.
It is all sick to death: the water is too polluted for the fish, the sky is too thin for the birds and the soil is cut with the bones of hermits and shepherds.
I have heard it said that human ashes make great fertilizer, that we could sow a great forest from all that is left of your hips and ribcage, with enough left over to thicken the air and repopulate the bay. My teeth will curl and my fingernails fall off into my pockets like loose change. Were the livestock still here, I could turn feral and gorge. This is the most left-field bit of script so far.
The key thing is to take it all literally — everything the narrator says is absolutely real to him, not a metaphor or anything else at all. I do not, for instance, remember where I found the candles, or why I took it upon myself to light such a strange pathway.
Perhaps it is only for those who are bound to follow. I have now driven the stretch of the M5 between Exeter and Bristol over twenty-one times, but although I have all the reports and all the witnesses and have cross-referenced them within a millimetre using my ordnance survey maps, I simply cannot find the location.
Its somewhere between the turn off for Sandford and the Wellcome Break services. But although I can always see it in my rear view mirror, I have as yet been unable to pull ashore. The narrator is talking about the crash site here. Do they pile up even now on the doormat of our empty house? Why do I still post them home to you? Perhaps I can imagine myself picking them up on the return I will not make, to find you waiting with daytime television and all its comforts.
They must form a pile four feet high now, my own little ziggurat; a megalith of foolscap and manila. They will fossilise over the centuries to follow; an uneasy time capsule from a lost island. Postmarked Oban: it must have been sent during the final ascent. This fucked up time sense really needs to be kept in.
Foolscap and manila are paper-types nouns again for stationary. Foolscap is slightly larger than A4 and is a size, manila is a cheap beige paper.
I have found myself to be as featureless as this ocean, as shallow and unoccupied as this bay, a listless wreck without identification. My rocks are these bones and a careful fence to keep the precipice at bay. Shot through me caves, my forehead a mount, this aerial will transmit into me so.
I will carry a torch for you; I will leave it at the foot of my headstone. You will need it for the tunnels that carry me under. And he really does believe that his rocks are these bones not his bones are like rocks and that the aerial is transmitting into him. This one could be tricky I guess…. Your hair had not been brushed yet, your make-up not reapplied. You were all the world like a beach to me, laid out for investigation, your geography telling one story, but hinting at the geology hidden behind the cuts and bruises.
It tells me that along with this present cargo, there was a large quantity of antacid yoghurt, bound for the European market. It must have washed out to sea, God knows there are no longer gulls or goats here to eat it.
This is actually pretty literal and straightforward I think, Antacids are chemicals which help with heartburn and stomach acidity, so this links back to both his kidney stones and the fact he sees the caves of the island as his stomach, plus also potentially to his burnt broken heart. How else could new hermits have arrived?
But it does to him…. You can see the buoy and the aerial. There must be something new to find here — some nook or some cranny that offers a perspective worth clinging to.
I sat, when I was at the very edge of despair, when I thought I would never unlock the secret of the island, I sat at the edge and I watched the idiot buoy blink through the night.
He is mute and he is retarded and he has no thought in his metal head but to blink each wave and each minute aside until the morning comes and renders him blind as well as deaf-mute.
In many ways, we have much in common. How disappointed not to have found the bones of the holy man! No wonder he hated the inhabitants so. To him, they must have seemed like barnacles mindlessly clinging to a mercy seat.
Because it is the only thing that stops us from sliding into the ocean. Into oblivion. The idea that people cling onto the lid of the Ark without ever understanding what it is seems to be a criticism of a lack of understanding, or of blind faith, but then he goes on to say that to do anything else results in oblivion. The tires are flat, the wheel spins loosely, and the brake fluid has run like ink over this map, staining the landmarks and rendering the coastline mute, compromised.
Where you saw galaxies, I only saw bruises, cut into the cliff by my lack of sobriety. Perhaps when the helicopter came to lift them home, their ascent scared the birds away. I shall search for eggs along the north shore, for any evidence that life is marking this place out as its own again. Perhaps it is us that keeps them at bay. I have spent days cataloguing the garbage that washes ashore here and I have begun to assemble a collection in the deepest recess I could find.
What a strange museum it would make. Shall I find a glass coffin and pretend to make snow white of us both? Cromer is a town in East Anglia, one of those dying UK seaside resorts.
It beckons you to walk upon its surface; but I know all too well how it would shatter under my feet and drag me under. The rocks here have withstood centuries of storms and now, robbed of the tides, they stand muted and lame, temples without cause. One day, I will attempt to climb them, hunt among their peaks for the eggs, the nests, that the gulls have clearly abandoned". After the operation, when I was still half submerged in anaesthetic, your outline and your speech both blurred.
Now my stones have grown into an island and made their escape and you have been rendered opaque by the car of a drunk. I have looked deep into the mountain from the shaft and understood that I must go up and then find a way under.
I will stash the last vestiges of my civilisation in the stone walls and work deeper from there. I am drawn by the aerial and the cliff edge: there is some form of rebirth waiting for me there. The setting sun was an inflamed eye squeezing shut against the light shone in by the doctors.
My neck is aching through constantly craning my head up to track the light of the aerial. I must look downwards, follow the path under the island to a new beginning.
One of those symbol-leaps, where the sun is like an eye which becomes his eye in another literal instance. It is a straight line to the summit, where the evening begins to coil around the aerial and squeeze the signals into early silence. The bothy squats against the mount to avoid the gaze of the aerial; I too will creep under the island like an animal and approach it from the northern shore.
How many dead shepherds could fill this hole? Lot and his family are warned by angels to leave Sodom just before it is destroyed, but warned not to look back. The foliage is all static, like a radio signal returning from another star.
Instead, I will put it to use, and decorate this island in the icons and symbols of our disaster. We took shelter en masse in a bus stop, herded in like cattle, the teachers dull shepherds. The sand in my pocket becoming damper by the second. By then, shepherding had formalised into a career. The first habitual shepherd was a man called Jacobson, from a lineage of migratory Scandinavians. He was not considered a man of breeding by the mainlanders.
He came here every summer whilst building the bothy, hoping, eventually, that becoming a man of property would secure him a wife and a lineage. Donnelly records that it did not work: he caught some disease from his malcontented goats and died two years after completing it. There was no one to carve white lines into the cliff for him either. A folding chair; I laughed at you for bringing camping in the lakes. I was uncomfortable later and you laughed then. This diary; the bed with the broken springs — once asleep, you have to remember not to dream.
A change of clothes. I will burn them all on the last morning and make an aerial of my own. I think I may have thrown it into the sea several times before.
This house, built of stone, built by a long-dead shepherd. Contents: my campbed, a stove, a table, chairs. My clothes, my books. My limbs and belly, famished. When the battery runs out in my torch, I will descend into the caves and follow only the phosphorescence home. I sweat for you in the small hours and wrap my blankets into a mass. I have always heard the waves break on these lost shores, always the gulls forgotten. I can lift this bottle to my ear, and all there ever is for me is this hebridean music.
The wording in the first sentence is very odd, but should be preserved. He is not to be trusted — many of his claims are unsubstantiated and although he does paint a colourful picture, much of what he says may have been derived directly from his fever. But I have been here and I know, as Donnelly did, that this place is always half-imagined. Even the rocks and caves will shimmer and blur, with the right eyes. The report is included in my edition of his book. The syphilis had torn through his guts like a drunk driver, scrambling his organs like eggs on a plate.
But enough definition remained for a cursory examination and, as I suspected, they found clear evidence of kidney stones. He is likely to have spent the last years of his life in considerable pain: perhaps this is the root of his laudanum habit. Although its use makes him an unreliable witness, I find myself increasingly drawn into his orbit. The laudanum and the syphilis?
It is clearly not how he began, but I have been unable to discover if the former was a result of his visiting the island or the force that drove him here. For the syphilis, a drunk driver smashing his insides into a pulp as he stumbled these paths, I can only offer my empathy. We are all victims of our age. My disease is the internal combustion engine and the cheap fermentation of yeast. Brittle and overblown it was, and desperately light.
Perhaps it was this that finally did for him, unable to contain the shattering of his heart. In half-light, his skeleton a discarded prop, a false and calcified seabird. The image here is of Jakobson as a kind of bird-man — with light and fragile bones, and the distended ribcage of a gull — that was broken when his heart broke. Even the animals shunned his corpse; the mainlanders thought to bring it home unlucky.
Donnelly claims they dragged it to the caves to thaw out and rot, but he is proving an unreliable witness. His fingernails were raw and bitten to the quick; they found the phosphorescent moss that grows in the caves deep under the nails. All around him, small flowers were reaching for the weak sun, the goats had adjusted happily to life without a shepherd and were grazing freely about the valley.
Donnelly reports they hurled the body in fear and disgust down the shaft, but I cannot corroborate this story. I will fall from the sky like ancient radio waves of flawed concrete. Through underground springs and freezing subterranean rivers. Through the bottomless boat and forgotten trawlers where nobody has died. The broken-up sentences in the middle of this should be preserved if possible, rather than trying to make them fit normal sentence construction.
Since I burnt my boats and contracted my sickness, this has become easier for me. It will take a number of expeditions to traverse this microcontinent; it will take the death of a million neurons, a cornucopia of prime numbers, countless service stations and bypasses to arrive at the point of final departure. Jacobson understood that, so did Donnelly. Someone has erected an aerial to guide me through these black waves, a beacon that shines through the rocks like phosphorescent moss.
I think the femur is broken. It is clearly infected: the skin has turned a bright, tight pink and the pain is crashing in on waves, winter tides against my shoreline, drowning out the ache of my stones. I struggled back to the bothy to rest, but it has become clear that there is only one way this is likely to end. The medical supplies I looted from the trawler have suddenly found their purpose: they will keep me lucid for my final ascent.
From this point on, more of the language becomes more fractured and odd, as the narrator starts confusing his body with the island. The torch is failing along with my resolve. I can hear the singing of the sea creatures from the passages above me and they are promising the return of the gulls. Can I identify the scratches his nails ruined into the rocks? Why did he turn back on himself and not carry through to the ascent? From here on in, his guidance, unreliable as it is, is gone from me. I understand now that it is between the two of us, and whatever correspondence can be drawn from the wet rocks.
Even though I wake in false dawns and find the landscape changed, flowing inconstantly through my tears, I know his reaching is always upon me.
If we can preserve the double-meaning, that would be great. I was waiting for you to be cut out of the wreckage. The car looked like it had been dropped from a great height.
0コメント