Have you ever wanted to know what it’s like to be in a coma, existing in some tenuous space just outside the reach of total consciousness? What if you had no agency in this world, but rather were forced to experience fragments of a previous existence without understanding the events themselves?

That’s the best nutshell explanation for Dear Esther I can muster. It is a concise, indelible experience, a playable metaphor without traditional structure or scope, but because I understand so little about it, who knows, I could be wrong about that, too.

Nevertheless, it is an experience worth having. The game is a beautifully rendered, auditorily pleasing adventure, and it only takes a single sitting to complete. Anyone who cares about video games as an art form should be interested in Dear Esther’s overall purpose, even if he – like me – does not quite understand what it might be.

It should be pretty obvious from the intro that Dear Esther is an experimental game, so placing it within the context of the horror continuum is going to be difficult. It is not obvious occultish phantasmagoria like Clive Barker’s Jericho, but neither is it a narratively rich deconstruction on par with, say, Mark Danielewski’s House of Leaves.

Dear Esther has no real game mechanic save for exploration, and it is not long enough to really warrant a full-on analyzation, especially not here. It’s brief, even by indie standards, but without it, arguably, we wouldn’t have games like Gone Home, which I would consider a much more mainstream and palatable example in this… genre?

In Dear Esther an unnamed character — not necessarily the narrator — wanders various parts of a seemingly uninhabited island, stumbling upon items that trigger chunks of epistolary VO and reveal fragments of a story to the player and, thus, the audience. Without giving too much away – and I kind of think explaining anything else about the game would only confuse uninitiated readers – suffice it to say, that’s just about it.

There isn’t even a ‘use’ button to interact with items, so it is the barest of configurations, and plenty of people would argue for that reason it’s not even a video game.

Horror fans might also be puzzled to find the review on Bloody Disgusting, for God’s sake, because what about this game could be construed as horror?

Rest easy. Dear Esther exists without a staple of traditional scary, gory, or disturbing elements, yes, but it is haunting and tonally dark, which ironically will make it more memorable than many horror gaming experiences I’ve had over the last few years. Something about the way the ambient music interacts and complements the baffling, fragmented narrative sets my teeth on edge, which places Dear Esther in a category unto itself.

As the player explores the rocky cliff side of this island, random VO narrates a splintered perspective of…someone. Or someones, I suppose. The narrative bits are not revealed with any linearity, so good luck in trying to decipher the story’s actual or metaphorical meaning. One would expect that, as the game progresses, the pieces of the puzzling story would begin to align, but they don’t in an intentional way.

From what I understand, plenty of sites feature detailed explanations of the game’s plot. I haven’t searched for what the game is “about” or anything and my instinct is to resist that temptation. I’ll eschew them in favor of my specific experience. To that end, Dear Esther is a mystery box I’d rather leave closed. So much of our world is dominated by knowledge that it feels empowering for something to be vague and apocryphal. It’s oddly life-affirming.

Honestly, it’s difficult to actually review this game as a game, because the game almost manages to sidestep the need for critical judgment. I realize that’s a copout. Being a small art project does not absolve it wholly; that’s not what I’m saying. I’m going to give Dear Esther a numerical value, however weird that feels in this situation, but more than that I think it’s important to get across the idea that people should experience this game.

That said, Dear Esther is not for everyone. I cannot condescend to say that by not playing this anyone is a knuckle-dragging Neanderthal. That is not the case. Nor am I trying to say it’s too “smart” for anyone. It is weird and brief and intentionally vague, kind of like LOST before they tried to explain everything, so this game just might not be enjoyable for you on any discernible way, and I think that’s okay too.

But I still think you should play it.

The Final Word: Dear Esther is less a game than a guided narrative, but its benefit lies not necessarily in how it attempts to deconstruct gaming and narratives and how we interact with digital worlds, but rather in the world itself. The bucolic surroundings are easy to look at, and the combination of visuals with the ambient sounds and odd little narrative pieces make it something to experience, kind of like a dream you don’t quite understand but will remember forever because of the particularly unsettled way it made you feel.