Why Dear Esther and Dark Souls are so alike.
Dear Esther — A story based, first person, narrative walking simulator.
Dark Souls — A brutal JRPG, known for its unforgiving nature and its solid combat.
Why are these two, completely different games, so alike?
Dear Esther, leads you through its beautiful world, whispering or bellowing into your ear, driving you to it’s inevitable conclusion, its barren lands holding small secrets, caves sprayed with bio-luminescent formulas, hallucinated flashbacks, stunning imagery surrounding you everywhere you turn. Dear Esther was one of the first brilliantly executed “walking simulators” — games that ignore gameplay and focus on just using virtual worlds to tell a story, letting the player walk around. Dear Esther leaves you to guess what the story and its complex metaphors are about with environmental hints dotted around the levels. Dear Esther is obsessed with the details of its world.
Dark Souls, also leads you through its depressingly beautiful world, subtly pointing you in the right or wrong directions, trapping you and providing exhilarating experiences, completely absorbing you. Dark Souls focuses on the unknown, letting you figure out where to go, what to equip, who to go to, what to do, how to attack, what to avoid, what to unlock, how to defeat random encounters with other players. Dark Soul’s entire game is built around the bleak unknown darkness, refusing to handhold you, letting you figure out what to do yourself. Broken roofs, specific armour sets, character models, the 3D geometry of its space all link down to its unknown lore. Dark Souls is obsessed with the details of its world.
These two games are both unique, yet both sport similar techniques, both are obsessed with their world, successfully sucking you into it, capturing your heart and your imagination, your brain ignoring the black rectangle around it, your mind absorbed. These two games focus on the childlike wonder of exploring and finding something amazing. The studios making these games (thechineseroom for Dear Esther and From Software for Dark Souls) know this and so purposely leave mouth opening scenes for you to see — the caves in Dear Esther, the Gaping Dragon in Dark Souls (a personal favourite of mine), to name two of a plethora of situations.
Both games create this sense of wonder and unknown through the atmosphere they set up. The hauntingly beautiful music in Dear Esther follows you around and drags you down, whereas in Dark Souls the sound of your sword and your armour notating the sounds until you find a huge boss, where suitably enormous orchestrated tracks burst in, popping your bubble of solidarity and forcing your mind to think. The architecture of both games is immaculate — Dear Esther presents broken down lighthouses, abandoned shacks and homes, grounded ships worn away by the sea, mind warping caves and intimidating cliffs. Dark Souls uses broken castles, huge underground complexes, vast lakes of poison, the depths of hell and disused churches, filled with undead.
These intricate details force the player into believing the game’s situation, into projecting themselves into the game, into wide eyed, mouth open battles and narratives. Dark Souls and Dear Esther both exercise the idea of detail and subtlety guiding the player, instead of obtuse arrows and false voice actors, guiding the player along the same road as everyone else. These two masterpieces do the same, but ultimately lead you to believe that you are the first explorer there, the first to see these sights, hear these thoughts, experience these feelings — leaving you with a sense of purpose and achievement.
