Recent reviews by Patrick R

About an hour in I fell off the pathway and in between a bunch of rocks that left me completely immobile, no way to move in any way. If there was a jump button I would have been able to continue no problem but Dear Esther is a #seriousgame and what kind of #seriousgame allows it's player character to escape a prison of 9 inch tall rocks? The protagonist of Dear Esther is too morose to climb out of such a fiendish obstacle.

It's got beautiful visuals and incredible music, and if the writing were worth a damn I'd probably suck it up and play through that hour again but ultimately I think the writing in this is kind of terrible and nonsensical. It's so ridiculously obsessed with being mysterious and grim that even really basic details about the who, what and when of the story are completely obscured. Goes for evocative, mostly comes back inane. So maybe I was only 10 minutes away from the twist ending where it's revealed he invented the atomic bomb or is a ghost or whatever, but I don't care enough to find out.

Terrific puzzles and personality (little too twee for me, but the cuteness never gets overbearing) that I fully enjoyed, some tedious boss battles aside. On the other hand, that final boss is just awful. There might be an end game, but I didn't want to slog through that final boss to find out.

Still worth playing.

I wish I knew how to quit this. Even when you uninstall the numbers continue to go up, enticing you to return.

Save yourself.

Even with the simplified graphics (it's more an interpretation of an early 00's desktop experience than a simulation) the sense memory was pretty overwhelming. Playing this I even got into my classic sunken couch slouch I'd get into back in high school.

The story itself is admirably low-stakes and potent, even if the writing is slightly clunky at times. My ideal version of this game would be 15 hours long, accurately simulating the experience of languid three hour internet ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ sessions in which one never quite says what they mean or they do and it all explodes and they have to log off and claim later that their internet went out.

But I'm a mad man. This is definitely worth the 30 minutes to takes to play.