Dear Esther

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 Rema…

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 encount…

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…

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,…

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, particularl…

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 sta…

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 title…

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 &#8…

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 creativ…

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…

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 Edit…

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 Pinchbe…

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 wi…

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, an…

The ‘Landmark Edition’ of seminal walky story Dear Esther will launch tomorrow, developers The Chinese Room have announced. It’s basically the same game, but remade in the Unity engine with a few tweaks and a director’s commentary. It&#…

Alice and Pip have been off wandering their way through digital worlds from Proteus to Sacramento and are now hobbling towards a shared definition of a walking simulator. Find out what conclusions they’ve reached and why their definition categorically do…

Dear Esther may very well be the most famous walking simulator ever released, and also one of the best . Its 2012 release made enough of an impact that a remastered version called the Landmark Edition is in the works, and in October people who live in and arou…