Strange voices in BUOY chapter

[LadyFrog]

I've noticed this strange voices near those rock formations (graves maybe?) in Buoy Chapter. They seem to appear randomly (sometimes you had to restart whole chapter for them to appear near those stones). It is NOT FAKE! Check it out yourselves.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w_ZTEhFjfp8

Yes, I'm using noclip cheat just to show you quickly where it is, but it works even without cheats.

Has anyone of you heard it too? What do you think?

[Ailes]

No I didn't notice before. Maybe "remnants" of the shepherds that once lived on the island?

[Polyphemus]

At this point in the game there is a choice of four sound files, one of which will be randomly played. The sound files are:

bothyVOdistortion_001.mp3
bothyVOdistortion_002.mp3
bothyVOdistortion_003.mp3
bothyVOdistortion_004.mp3

You can find the sound files at:

C:\Program Files(X86)\Steam\SteamApps\common\Dear Esther\dearesther\sound\island\sfx

The voices are small snatches of the narrator's in-game dialogue, heavily distorted, and overlaid with wind noise.

The bit that sounds a little like "my god" actually says "my gulls have taken flight".

Have fun.

T: -)

[BlackstarMate]

Ok, so part of the mistery is revealed ;). But is there any hidden meaning to all of this?
I know there are many things that appear randomly in this game, but it always serves some purpose - like parts of a puzzle.

[Ailes]

引用自 Toadflax：

[...]

Eww, way to kill the mystery feeling to it :-O

Well as Bizon indicates you may have discovered the technical origin of these sounds, but what they mean game-/narration-wise is wholly up to us to decide, I suppose. And I think I stick with the idea that it's related to the shepherds who inhabitated that island once. If I remember right the narrator says something about them having put up these stones. The nearest explanation would be that their spirits are somehow still connected to them, or something like that.

[Polyphemus]

Well, there are essentially two ways to look at the story. Either;

1) the narrator is describing real events, at least as he sees them, or;
2) the narrator is experiencing some sort of hallucination / coma dream / metaphysical fantasy.

I know the above is true, because the game's authors are on record as saying so.

If (1) is the case, and the narrator is essentially telling the truth, then it's a story of a man suffering a mental breakdown following the death of his wife at the hands of a drunk driver. His condition deteriorates over time, as he looks for reasons or connections to explain the event. He cannot accept that something so disastrous and terrible could happen for no reason. He seeks explanations in chemistry, biology, religion, history, electronics, and mathematics, but finds no answer. Beside his already flawed mental functions, he's also suffering potentially fatal blood poisoning from an infected leg wound, and is attempting to keep going by taking huge quantities of diazepam and paracetamol, all of which would further damage his mental functions. By the time we get to the last half of the story, he is completely delirious, and all the facts are jumbled in his mind. He finally decides that the only release lies in suicide. And maybe, for him, it is.

If scenario (2) is the case, and the whole thing is a hallucination / dream / fantasy or whatever, if the island and the narrator's history are not real, then it's pretty pointless speculating on what the meaning may be. None of it's real, none of it's reliable, and it doesn't tell a coherent story. You can interpret it any way you like.

In terms of meaning, I can tell you (again, because the authors have said so) that not everything in the game does have a meaning. Some things are put there purely to confuse. The constant references to the number 21, for instance, are meaningless. The story of the saint in a boat without a bottom is meaningless. The diagram of the golden mean in the sand is meaningless.

It's a hugely complex piece of narrative, and I'm still enjoying it.

T: -)

[i5-11400]

I feel like ive been to the island

[76561198153579398]

Can't post a new thread because I don't have a non-limited account, so I'm doing it here instead.

I've personally given up on trying to figure out what Dear Esther is about, but I did come close before I realized that it wasn't mean to be made sense of. I keep going back to it nonetheless, and on one of my recent plays I found something that might be of interest to those who are still piecing it all together.

Under Sound>Island>SFX, you'll find a series of audio files named "whisper_00x".
Listen to them.
Here's the {链接已删除}soundcloud link for those who can't find them or are just lazy.

I don't know what to make of Strange_001 and Whisper_005, but they were the only 'out of place' files in the entire folder so to speak, so I threw them in there as well.

I've played this enough times to confidently say that I've never heard these sounds play at any point in the game.

Translations from Italian>English are as follows (Thanks, /r/Italy!) :

• Whisper_001 : Mi mancherai. = I will miss you.
  
  
• Whisper_002 : È tutto a posto. = Everything is fine.
  
  
• Whisper_003 : Lasciami andare. = Let me go.
  
  
• Whisper_004 : Ricordati. = Remember.
  
  
• Whisper_006 : Torna indietro. = Come back.
  
  
  
  
  

[Ailes]

"Come back" is what you hear when you "drown" yourself in the water. Or at least that is what I hear in English language when I do that. I've never played the game in Italian. It's obviously a female Italian voice, ingame it's a male English. So it's probably used for something else. Or not at all. Perhaps this stuff was recorded but never made it in the game. Or it's extremely well hidden. Or it was placed among the game files with the sole purpose of irritating the players. I think I remember someone once wrote that he learned from the some dev interview or something that some symbolic items in the game have no deeper purpose, at least none from the developers' side. Don't pin me down on that though I've never been following these discussions or anything beyond too much.