You don’t kill, shoot or level up in Dear Esther. You don’t even control your flashlight, it just clicks on automatically when you enter a dark space. Instead, Dear Esther is strictly about exploration, about piecing together a randomized story and trying to make sense of something that, by design, isn’t really supposed to make sense. According to thechineseroom’s
creative director Dan Pinchbeck, the roughly two-hour long game was designed to elicit emotion. And yet despite the absence of traditional
video game goals, the ways of achieving this emotion were very much based on established principles of
game design.
In Dear Esther you start on a desolate piece of land. It’s very clear something went wrong, but exactly what is never made clear. Your movement speed is slow, forcing you to stare at the beautiful landscapes and soak in the
soundtrack as you travel between points of interest. Every once in a while you’ll cross an invisible trigger and prompt a narrator to tell a small piece of the story. The game pulls from a batch of four possible story pieces, so as you play again, chances are you’ll hear different segments of story presented in a different order.
“We don’t look at a Jackson Pollock and it’s critical for us to work out in which order the paint hit he canvas,” said Pinchbeck. “That holds up in games. We’re not looking for the sense in Angry Birds or in Tetris. It’s just an experience we can engage in.”
Because of Dear Esther’s story randomization and the way all the pieces lock together, the mystery of the story drives the experience. “As far as we’re concerned, story is gameplay,” said Pinchbeck. “Story is simply a tool which enables us to create an experience, in the same way that
physics enables us to create an experience in the same way that AI does. It’s irrelevant whether or not the story makes sense, what’s actually important is whether the player is following the emotional path at that point.”
Pinchbeck described that realization as liberating. In order to strengthen the emotional connections between the story and the environment, objects like bird nests were built into the game to link to the overall theme. “What we’re doing with these things, even though they’re not necessarily making any sense, is we’re lining up a bunch of emotional assets for players, which we can then use as a way of manipulating their experience. They key here is we’re never saying to the player ‘you have to understand this.’” Instead, according to Pinchbeck, it’s important that players simply feel the emotional impact.
That kind of approach was risky, admitted Pinchbeck, because if presented the wrong way it could be extremely irritating to players. And if you played Dear Esther, maybe you were extremely irritated by its pacing and deliberate opacity. To counteract the tendency for players to reject something that didn’t make any sense, Pinchbeck knew the environments had to be pretty enough to keep people moving forward and curious about what might be around the next corner.
“It’s got to be absolutely drop-dead gorgeous,” said Pinchbeck, explaining that it was important that the player understood that a huge amount of time and effort went into the visuals to establish trust. “[Players] are more likely to trust us when we say you might not recognize what’s going on in the gameplay initially, but if we invested this much in how it looks and how it sounds, trust us that we’ve invested just as much in making sure you have a good experience.”
As the game progresses, “there’s a shift away from the idea of going for realism toward impressionism. We gradually break down reality a little bit to allow us to do that. The player is kind of found in the mind of the narrator, and so you have to identify with him because you’re physically placed within the emotional state.” Pinchbeck singled out the mid-game cave section, in particular, as a good example of how the environments
mirror the emotional state of the narrator. “It turned out to be an incredibly powerful tool. Far, far, far more powerful than telling [the player] how to feel.”
Dear Esther Trailer
In addition to randomizing story, placement of specific objects in-game were moved around, which Pinchbeck said fueled the post-game experience as players clicked into
message board to try and piece together some kind of cohesive meaning. Apparently some players have spent 12 to 15 hours replaying Dear Esther to extract as much as possible out of the game.
“The designer says you
play the game my way, you have a good time. But you’ve got to play it my way. That’s not meant to fool you or strong arm you, it’s just a contract. And again it comes down to the depth of the fidelity of the environment and the attention to detail is our way of establishing that contract with the player. The design principle behind that is absolutely no different from any other traditional game design.”
Though it may be difficult to notice upon first playing, Pinchbeck and his team also used traditional progression
mechanics throughout Dear Esther with the way the game’s symbols were presented. “As we started moving further and further away from reality, the story’s making less and less sense, you’re seeing weirder and weirder stuff, it’s making stranger and stranger noises, we ramp up that curve. We almost increase our creative freedom to mess with these symbols in a completely identical way to the way you ramp up the difficulty curve in a shooter.”
With Dear Esther, Pinchbeck and thechineseroom wanted to explore what happened when a game encouraged players to slow down. “Lack of stimulation is not lack of experience. Lack of stimulation allows different kinds of reflective emotional experiences for the player to evolve and to grow out of it. We have to provide space and time for different types of emotions to flourish. All the devices in [Dear Esther] are encouraging the player to slow down and to focus intensely. You get this incredible building kind of emotional journey. If the player’s got stuff to think and feel about, they’ll use that time to think and feel about it. And they will come outside of that experience in a stronger
position in terms of that design contract with you. They’re invested heavily in the game. You can’t feel certain things when you’re being rushed. Overstimulation kills atmosphere.”
“If they’re feeling, it’s fine,” said Pinchbeck. “If they’re engaged emotionally, they don’t have to be engaged intellectually. We know this from so many games which aren’t of this type, from things like Audiosurf and all those rhythm games. There’s absolutely no difference
applying that principle to a story-driven game. People just want to feel in a space. People are hungry to feel in a space and soak up that atmosphere.”
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