Shameless Gaming Reflection #5: LIMBO and Dear Esther

The concept here is pretty simple. I want to write a bit about every game I’ve completed (or in the case of Zelda, spent a good deal of time on) during Shameless Gaming Month as a sort of reflection on the experience. I guess they could be considered mini-reviews, only without a silly score tacked on at the end. It’s just a fun way to remember the ups and downs of each game.

This is a slightly longer post than the last few. As LIMBO and Dear Esther are far shorter games than those in my previous reflections, I decided to bundle them together for one post.

LIMBO

If you ever read this, McGarnical, thank you for gifting me this game. It was a great experience.

The greatest strength of this game is really its ambiguity. There’s no dialogue or text boxes anywhere to tell you what you’re doing or why. The only description given simply says ‘Uncertain of his sister’s fate, a boy enters LIMBO’, and of course yesterday I was talking about how a simple narrative premise is fine if the gameplay is solid. And it is, but the star feature of LIMBO is that ambiguity and atmosphere. A reserved soundtrack accompanies black and white visuals as you navigate across a warped and dangerous land.

I really hate spiders. Not sure I’d classify it as a phobia, but I hate them. Even video game representations. So the first area of LIMBO involving a series of boss sequences against a giant spider was utterly horrifying for me. But horrifying isn’t bad. LIMBO seems to play on that phobia. In the first encounter with the spider, you only see a few of its legs, and you have to bait it into attacking you. And that’s terrifying.

Especially terrifying when you fail. The death sequences in the game are surprisingly brutal, from being impaled by a spider limb to being torn apart by a circular saw. Seeing this young boy die always felt like I’d failed him, which is the kind of response I don’t normally have with games.

I’m not the best at puzzle games, but I was surprised by how well I did here, despite admitting defeat and resorting to a walkthrough once or twice right at the end. The puzzles are all about observation. Everything on the screen has a part to play in the puzzle. My favourite puzzle in that regard involved pulling two different ropes that slowly lifted blocks that barred my progress. There was a minecart hiding in a corner, and for the longest time I couldn’t figure out why. When the solution came to me, it was like an epiphany, and seeing everything fall into place from there was a rewarding experience. There are a lot of puzzles like that in this game, and I was happy to encounter them.

The more mechanical the setting got, however, the more frustrated I grew. For my feeble mind the last few puzzles were a bit of a grind and rather stressful to figure out, and I’ve come to associate that with the theme of the levels, which took an industrial/mechanical turn. I have to say that I enjoyed the game a lot more in the earlier sections, in the forest setting particularly. Not because the puzzles were easier, but because it suited the atmosphere more. Maybe that’s because a natural environment plays on my fears more than something mechanical, I’m not sure. It’s hard to fault the game over a personal preference like that, so feel free to ignore this criticism.

As hard as those final puzzles were the sense of accomplishment as you break through to the ending scene was well worth it. And then a few things happen and you’re back to the menu, and you look at the image and realise how familiar it looks. And realisation sinks in and you come to your own conclusion about what exactly happened to this boy and his sister. It’s a great way to tell a story without words.

 

Dear Esther

Because this is a narrative-driven game, I’m going to be talking spoilers heavily, so read on at your own risk, friends.

I think this is going to be a bit harder to talk about, because there’s really not much going on in this game. It was enjoyable, the visuals were surprisingly impressive for the engine it runs on, and the narrative concept is intriguing. But at the end of the hour I spent in Dear Esther, all I could really think was ‘what did I accomplish here?’

It’s another ambiguous story and setting we have here. The player character, whose identity we can’t even be certain of, ventures to a seemingly abandoned island. Letters to Esther drive the story as you advance. And that’s about it. It’s a very simple premise, but there’s a lot of ambiguity to it, enough to leave you questioning, well, pretty much everything about the game.

Some of the key narrative details of Dear Esther apparently differ with each playthrough. Sometimes the driver responsible for Esther’s accident was drunk, other times he was sober. I’ve only played through the game once, so some of these details have slipped by me, but it’s interesting to think that there’s some fluidity in the narrative.

Because of these factors I have to conclude that the story in Dear Esther can be whatever you want it to be. From my playthrough, I concluded that the player character was the composer of the letters, and Esther’s husband. He had difficulty coping with Esther’s death in a car accident, and now, in the last days of his life, he has come to this island, which he deems important, to end everything on his own terms. There’s a few inconsistencies there, but I like this theory a lot. It adds melancholy to an atmosphere that is already quite dark and depressing.

Other theories might assume that the player character is somebody else entirely, who has simply come across a man’s letters to a woman named Esther and come to investigate. And in a way, the fact that players can reach wildly different conclusions is an exciting prospect. A game that makes you stop and think afterwards has done a good job. A game that has you talking about it at length with others has done a great job.

Some people might argue that Dear Esther isn’t a game, though. It does come across as interactive fiction, at the very least. I consider this a game. There’s not much to the gameplay, but that’s not a problem. It wasn’t boring, it was intriguing. It was only an hour, but it held my interest the entire time, purely through the strength of the narrative. And that’s not a bad thing.