- The best Steam games that have literally zero players - 28 December 2023
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 Remake is fire," "I totally ship Astarion and Gale," "lol how mid is Starfield?" Buried amid these decrepit slabs of black plastic and SSD trays, forgotten, forsaken videogames of a bygone empire. Once, they were adored by millions of people. Now, they are abandoned, left to rot in the Steam libraries of gamers past. It might be hard to imagine, a world where Baldur's Gate 3 and Counter-Strike 2 have become but relics. Time, however, is a brutal monarch. Even the best games are eventually left with zero players. Read the rest of the story... RELATED LINKS: Twitch Prime's next five free games are available now Dear Esther devs The Chine…
- Dear Esther: Landmark Edition is free to keep on Steam - 14 February 2022
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 encounter. It can be completed in an hour. Its studio, The Chinese Room, went on to make Everybody's Gone to the Rapture , though before that, it worked on the Amnesia spin-off A Machine for Pigs—the latter a kind of blueprint for the modern pacifist horror game (see also Outlast, Visage)... Read more.
- Dear Esther is free to keep on Steam right now - 14 February 2022
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 yours for keepsies. All the gloom and guilt and that wonderful, wonderful lonely island are yours! Happy birthday, dear Dear Esther, happy birthday to you. Read more
- This is the decade where exploration did the talking - 20 December 2019
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, created by Dr. Dan Pinchbeck at the University of Portsmouth. In his project, Dr. Pinchback would explore the nature of narrative in videogames by stripping back traditional game mechanics to a bare minimum. His results created something that was completely original to games and started a discussion that got right to the heart of videogames.  Dear Esther has no NPCs, challenges, collectibles, combat, and no fail state. You wander around an ambient island and a narrator guides your journey, a man reading aloud a number of letters he has written to his dead wife. It's eerie, solemn and quietly poetic and a first in a long…
- BBC Radio 3's Sound Of Gaming is a nice look at video game tunes and the people behind them - 26 October 2019
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, particularly if you, like me, can t stand to have lyrics on while putting words to paper (or internet) lest it become a tangled mess. (more…)
- Videogame tunes hit BBC Radio 3 with Jessica Curry's Sound Of Gaming later this month - 9 October 2019
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 station’s very-quite-serious musical collection later this month. (more…)
- Twitch Prime's free games for February include Downwell, Dear Esther - 1 February 2019
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 titles, even if most have been around the block a few times. Enjoyable survival adventure The Flame in the Flood, for instance, has already been offered as a Twitch Prime freebie before. If you didn't snag it then, however, it's definitely worth doing so now. Developed by The Molasses Flood and released in 2016, it delivers a wonderfully atmospheric, and distinctly soggy, twist on the well-worn rogue-lite survival formula. The general gist is that you, along with your trusty canine pal, set forth down a procedurally generated, frequently tumultuous river, stopping off at the occasional island to scavenge supplies, and craft up useful items…
- The Humble Caffeine Bundle is full of games worth staying up late for - 22 January 2019
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 – there’s eight games here, each one representing a wildly different genre. We’ve got the Metroidy Headlander , platform roguelike Gonner , party game tank shooter Treadnauts, a historical novel adaptation and even a ninja stealth sim all up in here. There’s only (in my opinion) one game that’s not immediately worth your attention. See the full lineup and trailers below. (more…)
- Sumo buys Everybody's Gone to the Rapture studio The Chinese Room - 14 August 2018
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 creative director of The Chinese Room, while Curry will continue her career independently as a composer, Sumo said. Pinchbeck added he's now working on new concepts. In a blog post , he said The Chinese Room is talking to potential partners about a new game, "something bigger"... "something that takes a more traditional game genre - no, you don't get to know what just yet - and lets us spin our worlds and stories on top of that. It's going to be very, very exciting." Read more…
- How The Chinese Room rebuilt Dear Esther for a live tour - 12 April 2018
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 it?!" She was speaking with the Barbican's Contemporary Music Programmer, Chris Sharp. The idea came during a Film, Archive and Music Lab (FAMLAB) week Curry was attending. "They were talking about composers and how they work with silent film in terms of putting that into a concert experience," she says. She began to ponder that in relation to her expertise in videogame music. Sharp has previously summed up the Barbican’s work as ‘Slightly Insane Ideas Made Reality’, so Curry’s proposal would seem a perfect fit for that remit. "They were amazing from start to finish," she says of the Barbican. "They wer…
- Have you played The Vanishing of Ethan Carter? - 14 December 2017
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 Edith Finch has been one of my favourite spectator sports as a games journalist. The Vanishing of Ethan Carter is one of the better stepping stones on this long and winding road. It has players assume the role of psychic detective Paul Prospero, who arrives in the gorgeous Red Creek Valley on the trail of a missing boy. (more…)
- 'We're going dark for the next few months,' says Dear Esther studio The Chinese Room - 25 September 2017
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 Pinchbeck, the decision comes as a result of development, financial and health complications—the sum of which made running the studio in its current form untenable. Now, just Pinchbeck, Jessica Curry and Andrew Crawshaw remain, with all residual staff parting ways following the launch of its Google Daydream VR venture So Let Us Melt. "Lay-offs are never pleasant, particularly when you're all trying to wrap a game. We did our best to try and help the team secure new positions, and then we all—the whole team—threw everything we had at wrapping the game," explains Pinchbeck. "It didn't feel fair to anyone, least of all p…
- 9 games that need a battle royale mode - 8 August 2017
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 with a competitive element could borrow the format of a shrinking competitive space, randomly distributed weapons and dozens of players, to variable results. Some would suit it better than others, though. Here are nine games where we think a battle royale-esque mode could be explored to great effect. We'd love to hear your suggestions in the comments, too.  Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain MGSV has the tools, maps and precise combat for a great battle royale game. The layout of both open worlds has a variety of towns, roads, cliffs, tunnels and open areas that would lend themselves well to large scale firefights with a…
- Dear Esther Landmark Edition out tomorrow on PC, free to owners of original - 13 February 2017
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, and will be completely free-of-charge to owners of the original on Steam as of 6pm GMT/10am PT tomorrow. With it comes remastered audio and developer commentary for the game which is widely considered to have sparked the 'walking simulator' genre. It's been ported from the original Source Engine onto Unity 5 and has additional accessibility options, large subtitles, a crosshair, multi-language options, and a smattering of trophies and achievements.   Since the launch of the 2012 original, a number of similar games have come along—not least The Chinese Room's own Everybody's Gone to the Rapture. Of…
- Dear Esther s Landmark Edition wandering out Tuesday - 13 February 2017
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’ll be free for everyone who already owns the original Dear Esther, and it sounds like it’ll be separate rather than strictly an ‘update’, preserving that Source engine version and mod heritage. That’s nice. …
- Alice And Pip: What Is (And Isn t) A Walking Simulator? - 30 September 2016
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 does not include Dear Esther! Pip: Alice, when I asked you to recommend me your favourite walking simulators so I could go on some digital expeditions what would you say were your criteria? Alice: That they surfaced readily in this trash heap of a memory? Which meant they struck me for some reason. I think I picked walking simulators with a spread of form and tone, all quite different but all games where you can mostly just walk around. Some fun! Some colourful! Some spooky! Some so linear they’re literally on rails. …
- Dear Esther is being made into a stage play - 16 September 2016
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 around the great city of London will have the opportunity to enjoy it in an entirely new way: As a live on-stage performance. Starting on a small beach, with only a brooding cliffs and a small lighthouse in view, BAFTA-nominated narrator Oliver Dimsdale takes you through the game, journeying from the desolate Hebridean island to a car crash on the M5, a crisis of faith of a guilty heart, the lost shores of a dreamed shoreline and a final ascent through the waters of madness to the release of flight, the play's description explains. With the playthrough of the game on-screen accompanied by live narration and a live performance of BAFTA-…
- Dear Esther update will be free for owners of the original - 26 August 2016
BioShock isn't the only game that's about to be remastered for a new generation of hardware. The Chinese Room is updating its lovely, slightly spooky exploration-adventure game Dear Esther for the Xbox One and PlayStation 4. It's being badged as the Dear Esther: Landmark Edition, and will also be released to owners of the 2012 PC original as a free update. The Dear Esther Landmark Edition is a faithful port of the Source engine original onto Unity 5, the studio said , with remastered audio, a new developer commentary track, additional accessibility options including large subtitles and a crosshair, multi-language menus and subtitles, and trophies and achievements. The promise of achievements is bound to elicit a few snide giggles, as Dear Esther is widely considered to be the game that birthed the walking simulator genre a supposedly pejorative description of first-person games that lac…
- After The Rapture: The Chinese Room s Next Game, Total Dark, Is An Isometric RPG - 1 April 2016
The next game from the creators of Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture, Amnesia: A Machine For Pigs and Dear Esther will be a systems-driven isometric adventure, inspired by tabletop RPGs and wargames. I spoke to The Chinese Room’s studio director Dan Pinchbeck about the game, Total Dark, and he explained that he’s wanted to make a game driven by RPG-style mechanics for a long time. As well as providing us with some of the first details about Total Dark, he discussed the continuing influence of Esther, and the ways in which ‘walking simulators’ are returning to their first-person adventure roots. …
- Everybody s Gone To The Rapture PC Confirmed, Coming Soon - 1 April 2016
Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture , the latest from Dear Esther and Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs developers The Chinese Room, is finally heading to PC. I spoke to studio head Dan Pinchbeck earlier this week and he told me that the completed PC port has now been delivered to Sony, who will be acting as publishers. Sony’s role means they’ll be responsible for selecting a release date and marketing the game, as they did with Helldivers when it came to PC late last year. But it’s coming. The rapture is coming. …
