At one point, he becomes Paul writing about being carried off by Donnelly, her husband, who was screaming that he wasn’t drunk as if it were a revelation. The narrator switches tenor and persona multiple times throughout the game, sometimes within the same short passage. There are signs of life and the artifacts of someone who went to a great deal of effort to create paintings and shrines and broken phrases all over the island, yet there is no one but us. It removes nearly all agency from the player save looking and moving. In doing this, Dear Esther becomes less about what those connections might mean in a symbolic sense and more about the meaning behind the work trying to make those connections.ĭear Esther is an unnerving work. It’s postmodern self-reflection in which the work becomes about itself rather than about something else. We as the audience do that because Dear Esther is a creative work, but when a character in the work does the same, such connections become suspect. He is making literary and thematic connections to what to him was a real world event. They could, but the lines in the cliff side that warn away sailors by suggesting the danger of disease or the lines running up the narrator’s infected leg have no real connection to the tragedy outside of the man’s mind.
The parallel lines that come up several times could connect to the parallel lines in the center of the road that Paul violated and which caused the accident. The player is haunting an uninhabited island off the coast of Scotland forever running in circles, using both his feet and his mind.Ĭertain motifs can be connected to different elements of his tragedy. The ghost story is about a ghost and that ghost is us. The player is already dead, forever circling the island. Donnelly, Paul, Jakobson, and the hermit all may or may not all be the same people given they way that the narration weaves in and out of his thoughts. But there is so much more to the story than that. The player is the narrator who is Esther’s husband and who has lost a part of himself in her car crash. Repeated motifs crop up in the letters, such as parallel lines, infected legs, bottomless boats, kidney stones, Damascus, and other things. Many have replayed the game to hear new passages read aloud to try and glean some insight into who all the people mentioned in the letters are and how they are interconnected. Much speculation has occurred concerning what the letters to Esther signify or mean. All of this is important to the meaning of Dear Esther. And after seeing some or hearing about them from others, you may even convince yourself to have seen some that weren’t even there as figments. The ghosts that inhabit the island are figments of the past. All of these elements, including the voiceover readings of the letters (a representation of the letters themselves found in the last section) were there before you arrived. While I’m sure many of you already know these facts about the game, I feel it necessary to write them to make this point. Are they really there or are they a play of pixels against the scenery? And as you walk around the island, shadowy human like figures can be seen in the distance at random points that disappear when approached or when you lose line of sight. Images of circuitry, neurons, chemical compounds, and finally, sentence fragments are painted everywhere across the island. You hear a voice reading letters to a woman named Esther, passages from history, and meandering snippets of thoughts.
You appear on an uninhabited Hebridean island off the mainland of Scotland. So what happens in a game when that creates an unnerving atmosphere, but no threat?ĭear Esther is a ghost story. The threat creates fear, and the fear creates the tension. For every appearance of a monster, psycho, or ghost, there is the threat of death and harm. It creates a tension between the normal and the out of place. By taking them out of their comfort zone and presenting them something just a bit off.
0 kommentar(er)
