Remember: You can recommend a game because it's fun, but you can't recommend a work of art because you don't know what reaction it will cause.

So, don't take this as a recommendation, but Dear Esther is great. Great as a work of art, great as an exploration into isolation and guilt, great as an experience you can play on your computer. But not great as a game. Which is what everyone here keeps referring to it as, and keeps thinking of it as.

Dear Esther succeeds because it is very good art, but a very bad game. This is the opposite of what most video games are, being good games that are bad art.

Yes, art is subjective blah blah, what with all the ways you can classify it as, but taking a more objective view of it, we can say that art is the human triumph of creating something unique, irreplaceable. And when something is unique, everyone has their own opinions about it.

But even as Dear Esther gets negatively compared to a "walking simulator" with no interactive components, this is not a negative, but its strengths.

It's easy to finish Dear Esther within 2 hours. The only "game" component to accomplish is to find the end of the "level". The challenge, rather, is in the gamer-unbearable limitations presented in Dear Esther: the loneliness, the isolation, the sparse and unforgiving environment.

If you find playing Dear Esther to be boring and unfulfilling, you may want to consider that the dev wanted you to feel these feelings.

Just as with Bioshock, the ease of progression in Dear Esther is all in service to the narrative. The story comes off as opaque and indecipherable due to disjointed clues and an unreliable narrator (who could be anyone, let's be honest), but the themes and accompanying visuals are so strong that they can't be ignored. Even if you have no clue as to what is going on, it's clear that something distinct is going on.

Without getting into specifics, I found the story to be shocking and apt for this medium. It's a mystery that perfectly suits Dear Esther's first-person perspective. Then again, I am a fan of the "guilty husband" theme as found in Inception and Shutter Island (both starring Leo and released the same year, 2010, weird).

So don't take this as a recommendation. It's probably better that fewer people play this masterpiece. It's not fun, it's prone to be misinterpreted, and gamers have improperly taken to mining its code and assets for answers, something weird considering that, although puzzles are meant to be solved, myths serve to lionize its subjects as they take root in the public consciousness.

Long live Dear Esther. May you continue to flummox unbelievers as you spawn more imitators to the crown.

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