Dear Esther

The best Steam games that have literally zero players

It's the year 2123. Half-Life 3 still isn't out yet. In a dark, dusty server farm, two explorers finally break through the wall to the inner chamber. Flashlights dance across strange hieroglyphics, ancient messages etched into the whiteboard - "Dead Space Remake is fire," "I totally ship Astarion and Gale," "lol how mid is Starfield?" Buried amid these decrepit slabs of black plastic and SSD trays, forgotten, forsaken videogames of a bygone empire. Once, they were adored by millions of people. Now, they are abandoned, left to rot in the Steam libraries of gamers past. It might be hard to imagi

Dear Esther: Landmark Edition is free to keep on Steam

Dear Esther is a milestone in the development of the modern exploration game, often pejoratively referred to as "walking simulators". Originally a Half-Life 2 mod, Dear Esther has players wander a lonely island as a story unfolds via the landmarks they encounter. It can be completed in an hour. Its studio, The Chinese Room, went on to make Everybody's Gone to the Rapture , though before that, it worked on the Amnesia spin-off A Machine for Pigs—the latter a kind of blueprint for the modern pacifist horror game (see also Outlast, Visage)... Read more.

Dear Esther is free to keep on Steam right now

Ten years ago today, the commercial remake of Hebridean gloom simulator Dear Esther launched. But this year, we're the ones getting presents. The developers, The Chinese Room are giving Dear Esther away free on Steam for 48 hours. Grab it by Wednesday and it's yours for keepsies. All the gloom and guilt and that wonderful, wonderful lonely island are yours! Happy birthday, dear Dear Esther, happy birthday to you. Read more

This is the decade where exploration did the talking

With the commercial release of Dear Esther in 2012, The Chinese Room had no idea that their interactive ghost story would cause quite the cultural shift in the video game world. Originally developed as a Half-Life 2 mod, Dear Esther was an experiment of sorts, created by Dr. Dan Pinchbeck at the University of Portsmouth. In his project, Dr. Pinchback would explore the nature of narrative in videogames by stripping back traditional game mechanics to a bare minimum. His results created something that was completely original to games and started a discussion that got right to the heart of videoga

BBC Radio 3's Sound Of Gaming is a nice look at video game tunes and the people behind them

BBC Radio 3 are getting stuck in to the world of video game music beginning today, with composer Jessica Curry (whose work you ll hear in Dear Esther and Everybody s Gone To The Rapture) beginning her new show Sound Of Gaming. It s good listening, particularly if you, like me, can t stand to have lyrics on while putting words to paper (or internet) lest it become a tangled mess. (more…)

Videogame tunes hit BBC Radio 3 with Jessica Curry's Sound Of Gaming later this month

Congratulations, videogames. You’re high culture now. Jessica Curry, the composer behind Dear Esther and Everybody’s Gone To The Rapture, is bringing gaming to BBC Radio 3 with Sound Of Gaming, entering indie bops and orchestral jams into the station’s very-quite-serious musical collection later this month. (more…)

Twitch Prime's free games for February include Downwell, Dear Esther

Twitch has unveiled the line-up of games that Twitch Prime members can download and keep for nowt as part of their subscription in February: Dear Esther, Downwell, The Flame in the Flood, and Draknek & Co Puzzle Collection. It's a strong selection of titles, even if most have been around the block a few times. Enjoyable survival adventure The Flame in the Flood, for instance, has already been offered as a Twitch Prime freebie before. If you didn't snag it then, however, it's definitely worth doing so now. Developed by The Molasses Flood and released in 2016, it delivers a wonderfully atmos

The Humble Caffeine Bundle is full of games worth staying up late for

Today’s Humble Caffeine Bundle is chock full of very good games for very little money, but a little hard to categorise. United under the banner of Caffeine – a “social broadcasting platform for gaming”, not the life-giving stimulant – there’s eight games here, each one representing a wildly different genre. We’ve got the Metroidy Headlander, platform roguelike Gonner, party game tank shooter Treadnauts, a historical novel adaptation and even a ninja stealth sim all up in here. There’s only (in my opinion) one game that’s not immediately wor

Sumo buys Everybody's Gone to the Rapture studio The Chinese Room

Sumo has bought The Chinese Room. The Crackdown 3 developer said it had acquired The Chinese Room, the studio behind Everybody's Gone to the Rapture and Dear Esther, from founders Dan Pinchbeck and Jessica Curry. Brighton-based Pinchbeck is on board as creative director of The Chinese Room, while Curry will continue her career independently as a composer, Sumo said. Pinchbeck added he's now working on new concepts. In a blog post, he said The Chinese Room is talking to potential partners about a new game, "something bigger"... "something that takes a more traditional game genre - no, you don't

How The Chinese Room rebuilt Dear Esther for a live tour

The Chinese Room cofounder and composer Jessica Curry summarises her initial pitch for a live performance of Dear Esther in a typically humorous manner: "I've had this possibly really bad and commercially unviable idea—how would you feel about it?!" She was speaking with the Barbican's Contemporary Music Programmer, Chris Sharp. The idea came during a Film, Archive and Music Lab (FAMLAB) week Curry was attending. "They were talking about composers and how they work with silent film in terms of putting that into a concert experience," she says. She began to

Have you played The Vanishing of Ethan Carter?

Have You Played? is an endless stream of game retrospectives. One a day, every day, perhaps for all time. Watching walking simulators evolve from the waffling emptiness of Dear Esther into remarkable narrative adventures like Firewatch and What Remains of Edith Finch has been one of my favourite spectator sports as a games journalist. The Vanishing of Ethan Carter is one of the better stepping stones on this long and winding road. It has players assume the role of psychic detective Paul Prospero, who arrives in the gorgeous Red Creek Valley on the trail of a missing boy. (more…)

Everybody s Gone to the Rapture devs hang up their walking boots

'We're going dark for the next few months,' says Dear Esther studio The Chinese Room

The Chinese Room—the studio behind the likes of Dear Esther and Everybody's Gone to the Rapture—has laid off all but three of its staff, "going dark for the next few months." As outlined in this blog post by co-founder Dan Pinchbeck, the decision comes as a result of development, financial and health complications—the sum of which made running the studio in its current form untenable. Now, just Pinchbeck, Jessica Curry and Andrew Crawshaw remain, with all residual staff parting ways following the launch of its Google Daydream VR venture So Let Us Melt. &quot

9 games that need a battle royale mode

Our assumption is that big publishers are looking at the success of PUBG and working out how they can take a piece of it for themselves. In a lot of cases, the potential exists within games that are already out there—pretty much every open world game with a competitive element could borrow the format of a shrinking competitive space, randomly distributed weapons and dozens of players, to variable results. Some would suit it better than others, though. Here are nine games where we think a battle royale-esque mode could be explored to great effect. We'd love to hear your suggestions

Dear Esther Landmark Edition out tomorrow on PC, free to owners of original

Last year, The Chinese Room released a console version of its flagship non-combat exploration game Dear Esther—named the Landmark Edition—and suggested it would one day land on PC. It's now doing exactly that, the developer has revealed, and will be completely free-of-charge to owners of the original on Steam as of 6pm GMT/10am PT tomorrow. With it comes remastered audio and developer commentary for the game which is widely considered to have sparked the 'walking simulator' genre. It's been ported from the original Source Engine onto Unity 5 and has additional