IGN Reviews – Dear Esther – Game Review

25 Comments

1. It will be so much fun if it was with vr

2. There is ghost easter egg

3. Game looks terrible. No surprise that IGN gives this Peppridge Farm bullshit a high score. Fuckin morons.

4. I was hoping for a "new" Ethan Carter

5. Age restricted…..why

6. The Stanley parable is better lmao

7. I bought this in a goofy mood, not reading up about it beforehand, wanting something different and i have to say i haven't played anything like it for whatever thats worth. It's hard to recommend this to friends as they tend to be closed minded to gaming experiences that don't mentally challenge you or involve like she mentions gun, puzzles ect.

8. Esther brought me back to gaming… so inovative and fresh. Thx chinese room.

9. Is this worth $2?? LoL

10. The game that started a genre

11. what no guns?

12. Still better than Gone Home.

13. If Chinese Room can keep this powerful emotional feeling and introduce some gamely features they might just break gaming forever. This is was one of the most effective and effecting experiences I've had in gaming and I rely hope others feel like I do about it.

14. I get some fallout vibes from the music

15. For people saying this is not a game; the goal of a game doesn't need to be killing enemies or collecting points. Dear Esther is a beautiful riddle/mystery you need to solve and understand and that makes it have a goal on its own.

16. why are there ghosts

17. the turning hurts my eyes

18. This game is everything a story should not be. Aside from being overly metaphorical, needlessly verbose and pretentious to the core, this is a textbook demonstration of "telling instead of showing". The "game" presumes that the player will be invested in characters such as Jakobson and Donnelly, and the presumption was wrong. We never met these characters and we were told precious little about them, so it is impossible to relate to or care about them.

    People from outside of Britain will have a lot of trouble getting used to the general vibe of the "game", as if the dated language wasn't a deterrent enough. For those of you not from the UK, the Hebrides are a series of islands to the west of the Scottish mainland.

    But most unforgivable of all, Dear Esther is simply BORING. The pacing was too slow, the narration was uninteresting, the scenery was pleasant but not top-tier, the "gameplay" involves nothing but walking, and the music was as generic as it was forgettable.

    Epistolary stories (i.e. told through other documents) can be great if done right; the story of Dracula, in the original Bram Stoker novel, was told through different diaries, journals, newspaper clippings and more, and it managed to be engaging and suspenseful to the end. Dear Esther misses all the right spots and comes across as nothing more than an over-ambitious experiment. One thing it did manage to accomplish is make me feel unhappy – the kind of unhappiness you feel when you've been bored to tears and cheated, instead of the unhappiness some superior story-based games such as Telltale's Walking Dead make you feel. I rate this game 3/10.

19. is art in a diferent way let your minds sink in the deps of the ideas that games are build of and you always learn something new

20. such a nice old game

21. I enjoy this game so much, the beauty and art in it are breathtakingly beautiful

22. I love games like this. I loved Everybody's Gone To The Rapture and Firewatch.

23. 1:34

    Except for Silent Hill 2, Dark Souls, Ico, Shadow of the Colossus, and Amnesia: The Dark Descent… all games that convey the same (if not a greater) amount of isolation, loneliness, and suspense without actually being devoid of life… but of course this is "far beyond what traditional games could ever achieve"

24. like No Man's Sky without the ship or the mineral extractions.(or the melee attacks) if you just want to take a little stroll in a place other than your own neighborhood, try going to the park.or better yet, get a fishing pole, go to the lake. this game has little more than that(and no fishing allowed), except that odd voice in your head of the british guy who is poetic about stuff.

25. 2:02 in the upper left corner there is something black walking on the cliff. is it a shadow?