The game I am sharing is Dear Esther. This game is developed by Pioneer Studio The Chinese Room and is available on PC, Mac, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One platforms. The audience of the game can be said to be very broad, from 6-year-old children to 60 year olds, people of different ages can understand different content.
The style of this game gives players a beautiful yet desolate dynamic. However, behind this beautiful desolation lies a profound game design proposition:
How does walking, the most basic mobile mechanism, fully tell a story?
Walking is an engine for constructing meaning
In traditional games, movement is often just a means – you run to reach a certain place. But in dear Esther, walking itself is a story.
Nicole Clark pointed out sharply in her feature article for Salon that the label “walking simulator” was originally coined in forums within the player community as a highly derogatory and exclusive derogatory term. Traditional players are accustomed to games that focus on failure feedback, high difficulty challenges, and high maneuverability. In their eyes, games that strip away combat and puzzle solving are regressive and exploitative.
However, Dear Esther precisely reshapes the interaction mechanism through this deprivation.
By depriving players of the control mechanisms they possess in traditional games, such as combat, jumping, and inventory management, the game reallocates all cognitive resources to interpretation and sensation. Walking here has become an interactive design that controls the narrative rhythm, forcing the player’s dynamics to become synchronized with the process of physical rhythm and psychological reconstruction of sadness. This special Dynamics gives players two special aesthetics – beauty, powerlessness, or simply observation. In this game, you are not just observing a narrative. Your physical journey towards the highest peak step by step is a metaphor for humanity’s efforts to piece together and digest trauma in the ruins.
More specifically, in Mechanics, the only physical input mechanisms for players in this game are movement.
As you walk, the game will randomly trigger a voiceover – a fragment of a letter written by the protagonist to his deceased wife Esther. The most ingenious thing is that these audio clips are randomly combined every time they are played. This random mechanism gives players the dynamic of being completely immersed in the story while playing the game.
The uncertainty of narration means that no player will experience the exact same sequence of monologues. You are not passively reading a novel, but actively stitching together a shattered piece of memory porcelain with your footsteps. The extreme narrative aesthetics that players feel are not only an artistic presentation of the game, but also a special ethical issue:
Is it morally and experientially reasonable to deprive players of the ability to change tragic endings in electronic games?
In most games, players are trained to do one thing: as long as I operate well enough, I can save everyone. However, dear Esther fundamentally denied this desire for control. We can only move forward along the predetermined path, towards that destined and heartbreaking endpoint.
It can be said that this design cleverly challenges the traditional notion that games must be able to ‘win’. In the face of irreversible tragedies such as a car accident and losing one’s spouse, the game deprives players of all abilities except for walking, forcing us to face the sense of powerlessness in the face of fate.
Grief is never an enemy that can be defeated with high scores, nor is it a puzzle that can be solved through logic. It is a path that we must walk step by step, enduring pain to complete. It tells us:
Empathy in games not only stems from what players can do, but also from what they are forced to witness.
Comparison with similar walking simulators
Compared to later benchmarks such as Telltale’s Walking Dead, which emphasized choice, or To the Moon, which relied on RPG elements in narrative games, Dear Esther was even more extreme. Even compared to other pure walking simulators such as Gone Home or What Remains of Edith Finch, it still appears particularly unique.
Other games usually place players in the position of detectives, reconstructing reality through highly interactive operations such as flipping through boxes and cabinets, reading notes, etc; And ‘Dear Esther’ sees players as ghosts wandering in a psychological landscape, you can’t do anything, you can’t change anything.
The gains and losses of level design
Although Dear Esther is a masterpiece in terms of atmosphere creation, from a game design perspective, it is not flawless.
During gameplay, sometimes you are just faced with a seemingly gentle grassy slope, but you are forcefully blocked by invisible boundaries, simply because the designer wants to guide you to a specific narrative trigger point.
Instead of using rigid “air walls” to block players, designers can use a more natural ecology to restrict them. For example, designing overly steep edges as loose gravel slopes will cause players to slide down when they step on them. This ensures that players stay on the path without disrupting the immersive experience of a real, desolate island.
