I played through Dear Esther, the semi-video game/interactive story as part of finals studying procrastination. I accessed it through onlive, the service that streams video games to your computer since my computer is quite old an is no longer really capable of running many video games. Dear Esther is a couple years old and utilizes the Half-Life 2 engine. You can purchase it for $10 or can pay $10 for the Onlive playpass like I did and have access to it for a month along with hundreds of other games. I’ll try my best not to put any real spoilers in the review but it’s hard to get a feel for the game without some details.
As far as a game goes, Dear Esther sucks. It’s really not a video game. All you can do is direct your character around the island. There’s no running, usable items, puzzles or tricks in the game. You don’t see any other people or movement besides that prompted by the wind and waves. The fact that you can’t run around the island and move at a walking pace was quite annoying at times but the idea of it is to appreciate the imagery and it’s difficult to do while your character is moving quickly.
