Adventure Gamers - Forums

So what does everyone think - was the island a real place, a metaphor for the narrator’s mind, or for his body? Was he in a coma, and if so, why? What caused the car accident? Who are Donnelly and Jakobsen, as opposed to Esther and Paul - are they somehow the same, even though the former two were said to be from the 18th century? What was Paul’s fate?
I like that the meaning of the game is left open to interpretation, but I would have liked it more if the possibilities were narrowed down a little bit, so there was more of a chance for gamers to draw the same or similar conclusions about what “really” happened. As it is, so many people have so many vastly differing opinions.

What was your interpretation of what was going on in this game?

Spoilers?

@J-Boo. Dear Esther grabbed me right from the start. I never felt bored, not for a moment. The first time I played it I was soaking up the atmosphere, mesmerized by the island, the music, the voice of the narrator, the blinking red light. Those beautiful caves with the crazy writings on the walls which came as a shock to me, and that really powerful underwater scene with the two cars! The entire game was a very emotional experience for me, especially the last part, climbing the rocks to the aerial in the howling wind, knowing what would happen up there and dreading it.

After my first playthrough I tried to make sense of the narrator’s disjointed story. I gave up when he started contradicting himself. At first I was disappointed and frustrated. Surely, all these little factual details about how he stole the Donnelly book from a library in Edinburgh, how he went to see Paul in the outskirts of Wolverhampton, how the crash took place at the Sanford junction, should add up to something. But they don’t. Not unless you start fantasizing and make up a story of your own. There was a car crash. Esther is dead. The narrator is going to die too. As far as facts go, that’s all we know really. Who drove the car, who were in it, who was responsible for the crash… ? The developers took great care to keep us confused (those feverish ramblings in part 3 and 4!) and gave words more than one meaning.**

I like that I can find my own symbolic meanings and have personal associations. I don’t know what the developers had in mind when they etched those white horizontal lines in the rocks, but they made me think of the horizontal lines on a life support machine (with a blinking red light… sending signals to the mainland, “where help will be sent”) when someone dies. The quote from Acts 22 “a light from heaven shone around him and he fell to the ground” can be taken literally of course, but the biblical Paul/Damascus theme is about transformation and death is the final transformation. 

So in the end I feel most comfortable with the interpretation that we’re witnessing someone’s last hours or minutes in an ambulance or hospital. For me, Dear Esther is simply about death, including my own death one day, and the lonely act of leaving this world.

**Both a strength and a weakness. It’s as if a word like “twenty-one” takes on a mysterious meaning, becomes a symbol of something just because it’s repeated so often. 

Irongiant909 - 25 August 2012 10:06 AM

Dear Esther is available for FREE this weekend (August 25th and 26th) via OnLive:

http://blog.onlive.com/

Grab it while you can (although I have to say that it’s extremely worthy of a purchase if you miss this offer).

I dont really like Onlive so I am gona skip it for now and get it later on Steam.

Irongiant909 - 25 August 2012 01:54 PM

Fair enough.

For anyone that doesn’t like Steam and DRM, you can also buy it from dear-esther.com

Comparing steam to DRM in general is getting old. -_-

Fien - 20 June 2012 06:03 AM

So in the end I feel most comfortable with the interpretation that we’re witnessing someone’s last hours or minutes in an ambulance or hospital. For me, Dear Esther is simply about death, including my own death one day, and the lonely act of leaving this world.

Somehow I missed the post until now. Thanks for your response.

I guess even though it’s a bit frustrating to me that there may be no “straight” story, Dear Esther is undeniably beautiful, emotional, and very moving!

I learned today (thanks to Advie’s 2013-adventures thread) that there will be a “natural follow-on to Dear Esther”: Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture.   

See http://www.thechineseroom.co.uk/rapture.html

Thanks! Hoping it will turn out as great as it sounds.