Dear Esther (2012)

Creative/Game Director, Producer, Level Design, Story Creation & Script, Narrative Director (including casting, voice direction, dialogue editing and implementation), marketing + PR, investor/publisher/store relations, Concept creation and development

Esther started as a research mod, asking ‘what if you got rid of the traditional gameplay and just left the world, mood, story? Would that still work?’. It’s generally seen as the first, initiating game of the walking simulator genre.

Actually, one thing that really makes it stand apart from other walking sims is talked about less, and that’s the fact it’s randomised. Each unit of narrative is pulled randomly from one of four possible blocks of text. This means each playthrough is probably unique, but more interesting is that two things also happen.

Firstly, it means that the story is open to the possibility of random collisions of imagery, which have the knock-on effect of subjective interpretation of subsequent imagery and collisions and so on. Hearing blockD of cue12 might be the only way the question of whether the narrator and Paul are the same person could be injected into the story. That could change how the player interprets all subsequent mentions of Paul. That’s really exciting.

Secondly (and relatedly), it stops being a story in the traditional, linear sense, in that the role of the text is to spark, inspire, question but never to reduce. It shifts the interpretation onto the player, there’s no canon or correct understanding of what is presented and it’s deliberately contradictory in places. It’s a deliberate attempt to do something in the manner of William Burroughs in an interactive space.

For me, it’s those things that make Esther different and why it’s remained such an influential game. It’s not the most obvious aspect of the experience, but for me it’s the fundamental one.

The other thing that was pretty divisive was the style of the writing. Dear Esther is, for me, about not just symbolism and abstraction but also spoken language. I’ve always been interested in how languages, both uttered and visual, have been used as attempts to cross beyond the physical to the metaphysical, occult or spiritual planes (Hilda af Klint’s work being one of the best examples of this). Dear Esther is not supposed to be literally understood, but emotionally experienced, like a tone poem or sound art. The way in which the words co-exist is, for me, more important than their meaning, which should remain fluid, vanishing, shattered, mobile. The texts I enjoy the most, whatever their medium, have this magical power: they conjure, they transport.