Dear Esther – Source. The best community-created story campaigns

Dear Esther was originally intended to be a piece of code created by employees of The Chinese Room willing to experiment with the convention of the game as part of a research project at the University of Portsmouth. The lecturer Dan Pinchbeck was able to develop this project thanks to a research grant.

However, the interest in this experimental production turned out to be so great that the commercial edition of Dear Esther was continued by Robert Briscoe, a former employee of DICE. Production costs were returned after just six hours (sic!) from release, and the game quickly became the loudest independent release of 2012. It won a whole lot of awards, proving that artistic success can go hand in hand with commercial one. Without big corporations – just a group of talented enthusiasts. Probably that's why it was so successful.

The entire game can be completed in just under 2 hours. The term "complete" is not the most precise in this case. The player's task is limited to wandering along the coast and collecting lost scraps of a letter, which the hero comments in his thoughts. Importantly, they paint a little different picture each time. It's up to the player to put the pieces of the puzzle back together into a coherent story. This gives an almost infinite number of variations of both the story itself and its interpretation.

1. Dear Esther in our encyclopedia
2. The game is available on Steam