Dear Esther. I am on a stone Jetty, the sun is setting, and I am alone on this island. I cannot interact with anything; all I can do is walk, look, and listen. As I walk, I hear a voice speak, reading fragments of letters to you. It becomes clear, as I listen to the fragments that I am following the path that someone else has already trodden; the author of the letters has preceded me in my traversal of this island. I walk on, the fragments of letters becoming more confused, the mental state of the writer deteriorating as time passes, until I have a vision of climbing an aerial tower, and plunging to the ground. I fly over the island, over all the locations I have already visited, until once again I am at the stone jetty, and the screen fades to black, with the words ‘come back’ ringing in my ears. Then I am back—back at the stone jetty; the sun is setting and I am alone.
Dear Esther is not a typical videogame, but part of a growing genre known as the first-person walker. It's Creator, Dan Pinchbeck, wanted to remove most of the ludic, the playing, elements of a game, leaving nothing 'but story to engage a player’ and so immerse the player into the world of the game, with no distracting enemies to kill, points to score, or princesses to rescue. (Biessener 2011). This means that I, as the player, am able to concentrate on the narrative, the setting, and the soundscape of the game with no distractions; the barren landscape is complemented by a gothic score, which creates a feeling of solitude, of increasing uneasiness as the game progresses, and I begin to make sense of the narrative. My aim today, is to show how these three elements, the landscape, the soundscape and the narrative combine to bring about a gothic experience in videogaming and produce an immersive, haunting, story.
At its core, Dear Esther is the story of a man who has lost his wife, Esther, and about his struggle to come to terms with her death, and his suicide, through which, he hopes to be reunited with Esther. The narrative unfolds through a series of letter fragments, written after Esther's death, in which the narrator relates the chain of events that has brought him to the island, and his death. As with many other Gothic stories, the haunting return of past transgressions forms the basis of a narrative that destabilises the boundaries between fantasy and reality, causing me, the player, to doubt what I am experiencing, where the differences between fantasy and actuality are no longer secure (Botting 1996, 11-12). Another classic trope, that of doubling is found not once, but four times in the game. Most obviously, the narrator is doubled with an explorer, Donnelly; the narrative text makes this explicit; the experiences of the two men are closely linked, both dying on the island of a broken limb and blood poisoning, alone. As well as this, there is a doubling of the narrator and Jacobson, a Shepherd hermit, and of Paul, who was involved in the crash that killed Esther. However, it is the doubling of the player and the narrator that is pertinent to this paper. The player follows in the footsteps of the narrator, as he returns again and again to the scene and the trauma of his death and just as the narrator becomes a ghost that haunts the island, the player to becomes a spectre of herself, and must repeat her passage through the island to reveal more of the story, again and again. This necessity of having to double oneself to attempt a fuller understanding is appropriately Gothic and uncannily echoes the conventional desire to replay a game in order to achieve a higher score. The player becomes the haunter, haunting the landscape, each replay re. enforcing of the narrators haunting of the island.
The doubling of the narrator and the other characters also produces a narrative in which the player is not certain who is responsible for what actions as the narrators psychological state deteriorates. The narrator begins by suggesting that Paul is responsible for the accident that caused Esther’s death, drunk-driving on the M5. The doubling of the characters, and the delirium invoked by the blood poisoning, begins to break down the mental barriers that the narrator has constructed, until the narrator implies that the accident was caused by the himself, not Paul, and that the denial of his culpability is broken down as he nears death: as he says at the end of the game in one of the fragments ‘He was not drunk Esther, he was not drunk at all.'
Clearly, then, the speaker’s role in the car accident is central to the narrative: the narrative bringing about the question, was he responsible for the death of Esther? The game does not reveal the answer to this question, or any other that arises, but leaves the player to interpret the letter fragments as they become increasingly more confused. At the beginning of the narrative, the letter fragments are lucid, detailing the theft of a book from Edinburgh library, written by a man named Donnelly to provide a guide to the island, and charting the death of Esther in a car crash, and as I have said, considering the responsibility of the character, Paul for her death. During the game, after the narrator relates that he has fallen and broken his leg, and that it is infected, the narrative becomes increasingly disjointed, the narrator revealing this confusion to Esther, relating that he is ‘increasingly unable to find that point where the hermit ends and I [the narrator] begins’ as he confuses himself with the doubled characters, and the strands of the letters being written to Esther become more and more entangled in the other characters, until I am no longer sure what is true, and what is a result of the delirium of the infection. What does become clear, however, is the narrators wish to die, and that the path that I am following is that of the narrator as he contemplates and commits suicide, before being returned to the stone jetty, to begin his journey again, a ghost haunting the island, with the player haunting the narrator as he does so. The narrator's haunting is manifested in shadowy, human shapes that are visible in the distance if the player looks, but disappear as she approaches, belonging in, and to, this beautiful landscape.
The setting of Dear Esther on a deserted Hebridean island, places it firmly in the Gothic context. The barren, yet beautiful landscape is as sublime as that found in Frankenstein or Wuthering Heights, inspiring awe in me as I walk round the island and also chilling me with its bleak emptiness. I pass, but cannot interact with the evidence of previous inhabitation, ranging from a stone circle thousands of years old to an aerial that sends a red beacon into the perpetual twilight of the game, their ruinous presence reminding me that I am in a typically Gothic space. I am told through the narrative, that the island was abandoned in 1778, and so most of the broken buildings that I pass are at least this old, their presence creating a feeling of gloom, of ruin that pervades the entire landscape. As with many other Gothic texts, the setting is an important device in the creation of the game, as important as the Gothic castle, a central character in the narrative providing clues for me to interpret the information I am given by the narrator, and as with many other Gothic texts, ranging from the Castle of Otranto onwards, the setting of the narrative is a space that houses secrets from the past, that haunt the characters (or in this case, the character). Dear Esther, furthermore, is part of the terror gothic tradition, which holds characters and readers (or players) in suspense about threats to life, safety and sanity, which are kept largely out of sight, in the shadows or in the suggestions of the past found in the setting. The games relationship to the landscape, and the primary playing technique of the game can be summarised best by one of the fragments the narrator relates as he crosses the third beach of the island:
To explore here is to become passive, to internalise the journey and not tou attempt to break the confines. Since I burnt my boats and contracted my sickness, this has become easier for me. It will take a number of expeditions to traverse this micro continent.
Playing through the game, the landscape foregrounded and my interactivity limited, I begin to question the landscapes verisimilitude. Like the narrator, I find myself ‘slipping into the delusional state of ascribing purpose, deliberate motive to everything’ in a landscape that is wholly created, whether that is by a game designer, or by the narrators own mind. For example, one of the opening narrative fragments has the narrator reveal ‘I sometimes feel as if I’ve given birth to this island’, while another fragment asks ‘was this island formed during the moment of impact, when we were torn loose from our moorings and the seatbelts cut motorway lanes into our chests and shoulders. Did it first break surface then?’ Most tellingly, the narrator repeatedly uses the motif of himself as travelling through his own body as he makes his way around the island, like the infection that courses through his veins. This landscape then, it is inferred, is created by the narrator himself, and is a product of his own imagination; the island is created in the aftermath of the accident that killed Esther. Visually, the landscape is littered with detritus from the car accident, and surgical equipment that would not be present if the narrator washed ashore, as he says, supporting the supposition that the island is a imaginative creation. The final passage of the game, at the point of the narrators death is a final letter to Esther, in which he tells her that he has ‘painted, carved, hewn, scored into this space all that [he] could draw from him’ and that he ‘will rise from the ocean like an island without a bottom, come together like a stone, become an aerial, a beacon’ giving further credence to the islands internal construction in the mind of the narrator. Where am I then, as I walk this island? Trapped, with the narrator, in his own mind, whether that mind is being held in limbo on an imagined deserted Hebridean island, or in a hospital bed, comatose, nearing death.
The third facet of this game is the soundtrack. I am by no means an expert on music and the sounds of Gothic, and so the influence of Isabella van Elferen and Vivien Saunders is clearly noticeable in what I say next.
The ideal method of playing Dear Esther is in a darkened room, with the sound playing through earphones to block out any external noise. The sensory concentration of this allows the sounds of the landscape and the musical score to become foregrounded and to take their place as an integral part of the narrative experience, alongside the landscape. Jean-Luc Nancy argues that music engenders a time and space of its own, which alongside the perpetual twilight of the island means that the player leaves behind the here and now of reality, entering the universe of the game and this perfectly describes the immersive effect of the soundtrack to Dear Esther, the ambient sounds, the disembodied human noises, and the musical score combine with the landscape to create this effect. Van Elferen, in Gothic Music, considers that gothic 'game music defies the borders of the screen and envelopes game and player alike in its own, sonic version of virtual reality' (van Elferen 2012, 106) with its Gothic sounds, ranging from 'hollow footsteps' to 'ghostly melodies’ (van Elferen 2012, 1). The game is filled with the diegetic sounds of the landscape, the crash of the waves on the sea, the sound of the wind across the island and the plaintive cry of a single seagull as it is disturbed, with the only diegetic man-made sounds being footsteps as I walk the island, The source of the footsteps is enigmatic; are they my footsteps as the player, or are they the footsteps of the narrator, reminding me of his prior claim on the narrative, and the setting, a supernatural echo that only I can hear, but the source is not locatable. Occasionally, the sound of a female voice, whispering ‘come back’ reminiscent of Cathy Earnshaw’s ‘Let me in’ (Bronte 1968, 54) at her bedroom window, can be heard if I sink into the sea, refusing to let me fade into nothingness.
Music plays at almost randomly, as I walk; a violin or a piano’s disembodied tones penetrate the diegetic sounds, dragging me, as van Elferen says, ‘along in the musical movement from the mundane to the divine or the occult’ and enveloping me in the timeless nature of the narrative, a time parallel to, within and yet without the present outside the game. A female voice can be discerned within the music, her voice a non-diegetic element of the game, which seems indistinguishable from the diegetic noise of the landscape, her litany an almost religious undertone to remind me of the islands position as limbo. As I pass specific landmarks, the non-diegetic sounds of the music are interspersed with extra-diegetic sounds relating to the landmarks origins, the sound of groaning metal as I pass the wreckage of the car on the beach, the soundscape and the landscape combining to create a haunting, eerie journey.
In removing the ludic aspects of the game, Pinchbeck makes the player focus on that which is frequently ignored. The landscape of Dear Esther, whilst beautiful, is not dissimilar in construction to Bioshock; both landscapes, while visually different, provide narrative background, and use audio clips to further the narrative history. Where Bioshock foregrounds gameplay over the narrative though, Dear Esther chooses instead to forgo this in favour of directing the player's attention to these narrative tropes as the primary object of the game. Combining this with the score and the fragmented, traumatic narrative, the game becomes an immersive and sensory experience that leaves the player haunted, understanding the actions of a man whose only hope of life is death and she is left moved by this experience in a way not as easily achieved by other media.
There is not enough time here to interrogate the game fully, to consider all the elements of the narrative, such as the repeating religious motif, or the relevance of the number 21 that is foregrounded by the narrator. However, what I hope to have shown is that playing this game, alone in a darkened room, with all external sounds removed, produces a ghost story in which the player is the haunter, haunting the narrator, just as he haunts the island, reliving with him his final days and death repeatedly in order to fully understand the narrative of the game, and that the medium of the videogame, with its visual, sonic and interactive elements (or enforced lack thereof), bringing about a novel method of presenting a sensory ghost story.
