![]() ![]() It's about coming to terms with some things ending and other things beginning. It's about recognizing our smallness and proceeding despite it. It's important, I think, to experience this kind of quiet oblivion and recognize that the game's true claim is one about togetherness. Humanity recedes into the distance, smaller than mountains, smothered by clouds. It is a game that can absolve you, but it does that through making you feel so incredibly tiny. It's the fact that it is a game about a world robbed of humanity that forces the player to think about their relationship to the world, to their personal failings, and to their guilt. It isn't the inauguration of the "walking simulator" or the randomized elements. This is the lasting power of Dear Esther. Things will end, the game seems to say, and the best thing you can do is come to terms with it. ![]() There's not a power fantasy to be had, but instead there is a coming to terms with tragedy. There's only a final journey for a collapsing protagonist reduced to monologue and melancholy. It's a rational, cold, calculating logic that keeps us surviving against all odds.īut Dear Esther empties out its apocalyptic world so that you can't fight your way to something better. It's about grinding out some kind of life through the friction generated by the conflict between you and everything that isn't you. The Flame and the Flood imagines that the only thing left to do is to loot and hold onto yourself while barreling down a river that you can't control. Joel needs to smash zombie heads apart in The Last of Us in order to save the world he wants to keep around. Most games about the end of things pit you against the world. The deliberate walking pace, the synthesis of sound and environment, and the attention to visual elements like a randomized ultrasound, in Pinchbeck's words, "makes each playthrough more personal." Jessica Curry (composer and audio designer), Dan Pinchbeck (producer and narrative designer), and Robert Briscoe (art and environment designer) all sit around a microphone and deliver their own interpretations of the game based on their contributions, but all three firmly argue that much of the game is taking place in the player's mind. It's not surprising that listening to the developer commentary in the new Landmark Edition spells that out directly. The strength of the game is not in the exact, minute detail but instead in how it shows us a world. It all smacks of something William Gilpin wrote 1972: "There may be more pleasure in recollecting, and recording, from a few transient lines, the scenes we have admired, than in the present enjoyment of them." Gilpin is talking about landscapes and trying to capture their beauty, but this is the same Romantic way that Dear Esther presents itself. In both the game and the painting, I have a distinct sense that this world is bigger than I am, and that I won't ever have access to all the tools that I need to truly overcome or interpret it rationally. The feeling of playing through Dear Esther is, for me, like viewing Caspar David Friedrich's Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog (always a go-to example of Romantic work): This dude is hanging out looking at these monolithic mountains swallowed by an ocean of otherworldly fog, and we're supposed to be like "Whoa, I mean, damn! Humans don't mean very much at all!" We're living in an age of apocalypse media we're beset on all sides with brilliant fantasies of the worst things that can happen to us as a species. Michael Bay has given us an Age of Extinction, Guillermo Del Toro has conjured Lovecraftian apocalypse via kaiju, and James Franco annihilated most of the world in his bid to be the first person to truly get to truly hang out with an ape. Games aren't unique in their fetish for the decimated future. Things are trending in a certain direction, and our media reflecting those concerns and exhilarations seems appropriate. It only gets more brutal and ugly from here, and you can imagine Road Warrior fans getting excited at the idea of a world with an ever-reducing carrying capacity that is tending further and further toward abundance for few and scarcity for most. Global warming has passed a tipping point that we can never go back from. As Sarah Emerson reported over at Motherboard, we recently crossed the dreaded red line of carbon in our atmosphere. We're not wrong to be fascinated with the end of the world. ![]()
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