Dear Esther is a weird paradox of a game - in spite of its environments being incredibly realistic and beautiful, in spite of it having far and away more detail than its original 2008 mod version, it also doesn't feel real at all. It's like a painting - because you can look at it, but you can't touch it, you're reminded that nothing in it actually exists.

I greatly enjoyed the original Dear Esther mod, but the reasons I enjoyed it were all unintentional, and all of them are lost in the remake. In the original, you could jump and sprint, you could even swim out of bounds and see the unmodeled backs of caves and mountains. You could pick things up, like paper sailboats, hear them knock against walls, throw them into the ocean and stare at them for a while. You couldn't hear anything clearly because of the poor audio mixing, so you made up conclusions completely unintended by the developers, made connections that were never written.

In Dear Esther, all of this interactivity - no matter how minor, no matter how unintended it was as the result of the original mod copying HL2's basic gameplay systems - is gone. So, as a result, it feels less real than before. As a result, it loses much of it atmosphere. As a result, there's no longer any mystery about what it means. Even the intended mystery of what the island means and what it represents is lost, thanks to distracting new voice clips where the original voice actor somehow manages to sound twenty years older than he did before, new voice clips that spell out all of the meaning.

So is the Dear Esther remake worth playing? I don't think so. As much as I dislike criticisms of these type of games as "Walking Simulators," and as much as I enjoy games like Gone Home, I think it loses everything that made the original mod of Dear Esther special. I would recommend playing that instead, with the lights low and headphones on, without knowing in advance anything that happens or any theories about what it means - it's a unique experience, something that really can't be done outside of an unpolished mod of a video game, and I think it's much more special.

Dear Esther is a weird paradox of a game - in spite of its environments being incredibly realistic and beautiful, in spite of it having far and away more detail than its original 2008 mod version, it also doesn't feel real at all. It's like a painting - because you can look at it, but you can't touch it, you're reminded that nothing in it actually exists. I greatly enjoyed the original Dear Esther mod, but the reasons I enjoyed it were all unintentional, and all of them are lost in the remake. In the original, you could jump and sprint, you could even swim out of bounds and see the unmodeled backs of caves and mountains. You could pick things up, like paper sailboats, hear them knock against walls, throw them into the ocean and stare at them for a while. You couldn't hear anything clearly because of the poor audio mixing, so you made up conclusions completely unintended by the developers, made connections that were never written. In Dear Esther, all of this interactivity - no matter how minor, no matter how unintended it was as the result of the original mod copying HL2's basic gameplay systems - is gone. So, as a result, it feels less real than before. As a result, it loses much of it atmosphere. As a result, there's no longer any mystery about what it means. Even the intended mystery of what the island means and what it represents is lost, thanks to distracting new voice clips where the original voice actor somehow manages to sound twenty years older than he did before, new voice clips that spell out all of the meaning. So is the Dear Esther remake worth playing? I don't think so. As much as I dislike criticisms of these type of games as "Walking Simulators," and as much as I enjoy games like Gone Home, I think it loses everything that made the original mod of Dear Esther special. I would recommend playing that instead, with the lights low and headphones on, without knowing in advance anything that happens or any theories about what it means - it's a unique experience, something that really can't be done outside of an unpolished mod of a video game, and I think it's much more special.