Dear Esther Landmark Edition review

The impression given by the room automatically turns into a judgment on who occupies it, a judgment based on the more or less superficial knowledge of this individual.

But if we had time to stop, that is to turn the room observing the signs left by those who live, signs that can be objects or simple ways to do something that normally we do not give any weight, but that actually have a weight ,

then we would also discover other things: a series of facts, small or large, that would better define the person and, at the same time, would take over that image that we had built ourselves mentally by observing it only superficially.

We would learn of small manias, of microscopic stories or of great passions and we would have a diachronic access to times and spaces that are not ours, in the indefinability of visible and invisible connections that regulate the life of each of us.

Do not deceive yourselves: the room is not giving us the complete knowledge of who lives it, that it is a possessive perversion, but it is giving us some splinters of a much bigger sculpture. Faced with these we can admit our cognitive limits, abandoning old prejudices, or we can develop new and more oppressive ones, returning to deceive ourselves that we have understood.

We have reviewed Dear Esther Landmark Edition, find out if it is worth returning to the island

Dear |Esther story

Dear Esther is a room. We can look at it superficially, limiting ourselves to note the fact that we just walk and that the story it tells is difficult to decipher, or we can slow down and start looking at each other serenely, suppressing the childish desire that someone leads us by the hand and abandon ourselves to the flows interpretations aroused by the dream associations and the artistic suggestions that compose it.

After all we are talking about the walking simulator par excellence, the one that defined the genre in its essence and its absences (of mechanics, of apparent challenge, of easy rewards).

There, where the traditional videogame is obsessed with providing easy interpretations of what it tells, interpretations that reassure the player, taking away the anguish of understanding, but at the same time stopping the reflexive drive, the pure walking simulator tries to become a mirror of the ambiguity of the life and the human condition,describing itself continuously in its impossibility to provide a consolatory key to the reading of the facts.

Honestly it is absurd to continue reading reviews of titles belonging to the genre that emphasize the slowness and lack of things to do: someone would ever criticize a flight simulator because there are airplanes that fly?

Despite appearances, it is not easy to develop a walking simulator, because in addition to knowing what to put in, you must also understand what not to put and, above all, accept it for what it is. Try to make one and you will find yourself constantly fighting with the sibillino terror of not being able to say how much you would like , making mistakes on errors to try to force a certain interpretation.