It looks like a game, and the controls feel like a game, but that’s where the similarities end. It’s a sad elegy for your character but a novel new direction for first-person games. At certain moments you’ll notice brief glimmers of figures in the distance, ghostly memories of the lost ones mentioned in the narration. As you explore the island, walking through caves, empty shacks and a shipwreck-strewn shore as if you’re prowling a barren battlefield in a nonviolent Modern Warfare, always inching closer to the radio tower that flickers in the distance, you’ll hear occasional bits of narration that obliquely fills in the history of this island and your character. It uses the immediacy of the first-person perspective commonly employed by shooters to minimize the distance between player and story. All you can do is walk around a desolate island and let the story slowly unravel.ĭear Esther is a ghost story told by an unreliable narrator. You can’t perform improbably high standing jumps whenever you’d like. It takes place in the first-person, but you can’t pick up any objects or shoot any aliens. Really, it’s following-up the long design history of FPS games and just pushing them in a slightly different direction.”ĭear Esther is a game without the play. “It takes advantage of the inherent isolation you find in many first-person shooter games, it plays with the normal process of discovering the answers, it co-opts the player’s expectations of what they will find, which helps build that dawning sense of dread. “ is the right story for this particular medium, used in this particular way,” says Dan Pinchbeck, writer and co-designer of Dear Esther. They reach different conclusions, though, with one largely avoiding standard game mechanics while embracing traditional narrative techniques, and the other streamlining both into an elemental twist on the standard heroic adventure. They can be seen as reactions to the type of sprawling, patchwork storytelling found in games like Mass Effect 3.
#Dear esther ps3 Pc#
Both Dear Esther, an independent PC game, and Journey, an exclusive downloadable game for the PlayStation 3, try to elegantly unite play and story while also leaving an indelible emotional imprint upon us.
Two other recent games that take a more interesting approach to narrative had already fanned the “game vs. You directly influence the story, but are largely a passive observer outside of several key moments.
#Dear esther ps3 movie#
It’s a movie where you control the action scenes and gently nudge the story in various directions via dialogue choices. It’s the current standard-bearer for the sort of heavily cinematic storytelling that dominates mainstream blockbusters, with copious cut-scenes and dialogue broken up by brief bursts of gunplay. Everybody tries to minimize the significance of the debate, talking about how tired they are of having the same circular conversation, even while regularly and stridently voicing their strongly held beliefs. Why should we evaluate them all like a comp lit assignment? Others point to games like the just-released Mass Effect 3 as examples of how the interactive nature of the medium can make stories more meaningful and personal than movies or television. After all, these are rule-based competitions first and foremost, built by large teams of creators, and lacking the singular authorial intent of a novel or a movie from an auteur director. Of course those stories were either subtext or limited to whatever words would fit on an arcade cabinet’s artwork or attract mode.Ī debate has long raged within the gaming community about whether the medium is suitable for storytelling.
Missile Command and Defender are bleak, apocalyptic warnings of a future undone by technology. Pac-Man is a Serling-esque grotesquerie about an insatiable glutton whose hunger directly imperils his life but also acts as his salvation.
0 kommentar(er)
