Caltrops - Dear Esther - Braid really did ruin indie games

Forum Overview :: Dear Esther

by fabio 06/02/2013, 5:32pm PDT

Vested Id wrote:

People love Dear Esther because it leaves them confused, but if you compare the original to the remake (the "official version") you can see pretty clearly what they were going for and it isn't much, certainly nothing deserving the kinds of love and attention it's getting. These guys love defamiliarization because it buys them time - no one knows what the fucking game means but they felt something - but there's more to art than addressing common real-life traumas like breakups and traffic accidents through unfamiliar representations.

This reminds me of The Void, which I kept meaning to write something on. It too is a gorgeous indie game with such a theme. The gameplay was halfway interesting (first person resource management sim), and the story was what would happen if a white knight wrote the next Silent Hill game.

But fuck it in the end because it kept teasing you with the idea that some story was taking place but nothing ever does. It predates Mass Effect 3 for false multiple endings via color filter. Each end is the narrator reading some poem, an incoherent version of DE: Human Revolution Basically.