It stuck in my mind for days afterwards, and although I toyed with the idea of translating Dear Esther's core mechanics to my own designs, I couldn't shake the feeling that there was so much untapped potential in the original, if only for a proper coat of paint and a more polished design.”įor Briscoe, Dear Esther's main weakness was the island itself. “A simple, highly original idea which was singularly focused on telling a story through the environment. “It was the inspiration I'd been looking for,” he recalls. Bible verses scrawled all over the island, and a flashing radio tower omnipresent in your view. Enormous chunks cut out of a cliff face in perfectly straight lines. Chemical equations etched into the sides of a cavern. Depending on how you read it, they might not even be three separate people at all. You learn of a syphilitic shepherd, an explorer whose infected injury sent him insane, and a man destroyed by guilt after a fatal car accident.

The audio clips tell you about the island's history while simultaneously documenting a terrible accident back home in England. Instead, it builds atmosphere and an emotional weight. But it's also – and this is really important to me – about love and hope and redemption, and how people cling to each other in the face of a brutal, uncaring world.”ĭubbed 'an interactive ghost story', Dear Esther is never overtly scary. “Grief, loss, guilt, faith, illness,” says Pinchbeck, when I ask about his interpretation of the Dear Esther story.

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