What made Dear Esther so unique was its abandonment of any tangible ‘gameplay’, but when Briscoe first came on board to remake the mod, the plan wasn’t always to strip it down to such a pure experience. “I did experiment a bit early on with adding gameplay elements, like basic puzzles, and I just found it distracted from the original concept. Any kind of traditional gameplay really took away from this idea that you could do something different with a first-person game space, instead of just shooting, and jumping, and puzzling.”
It wasn’t meant as a condemnation of these elements, but rather as an experiment to see what could be achieved without them. “I think the concept of Dear Esther was really about getting away from any kind of traditional gameplay and exploring new space in the first-person gameplay space, if that makes sense,” Briscoe muses. “Really, Dear Esther was more of an experiment to see how far we could push that type of gameplay, and that type of open narrative, and still have it be an interesting and memorable experience.”
