This is, without a doubt, the best Valve's Source Engine has ever looked, giving Portal 2's overgrown areas a run for their money. While Dear Esther turned my brain into fried mush, it's incredibly easy on the eyes. Each individual player and playthrough write the story in tandem. Sure, an author scattered the puzzle pieces, but I don't even think Dear Esther's creators know what the completed picture looks like.

As a result, this is a story only a game could tell. Who am I? Is the island even real? Who's the narrator? My specific answers to those questions would venture deep into spoiler territory, but a second trip through the island-shaped haunted house led me to flip my thinking cap around and view many of my theories in a new light. Narrations occur in a randomized order each playthrough (roughly two hours), and the way they link together opens up opportunities to draw different conclusions every time. Even then, there's no singular correct solution to Esther's overarching narrative puzzle. Tiny environmental cues and verbose, occasionally overwrought narrations simply beg to be interpreted. Dear Esther's slow and steady nature, however, drove my wandering eye to sponge up each and every detail of a tantalizingly ambiguous story. Most games treat environments like frilly window dressing sure, I might go wide-eyed and slack-jawed at a neat set-piece every once in a while, but most of the time, I'm too busy marathon murdering my way to the finish to notice.

At first, I found it sluggishly paced and utterly desolate - like trudging through a desert made of glue - but after 30 minutes or so, it all clicked. Without even a sprint key to its name, Dear Esther didn't initially strike me as being particularly interactive - at least, not in the traditional sense. I just languidly strolled across an abandoned island in an effort to figure out what my character was doing there in the first place, intermittently gawking at incredible vistas and listening to cryptic narrations. It's first-person, but there aren't any guns, terrorists, or slow-mo action sequences with doves who are also gun-wielding terrorists.

Dear Esther, however, involves no such thing. See, 'beat' implies that I overcame some sort of struggle. I don't know what happened in Dear Esther.

Dear esther cave