Dear Esther mod for Half-Life 2

I've tried this game now. Four minutes into the game, I found myself bunny hopping through hills, listening to four voices overlapping eachother with some kind of weird noises and a very overamped piano piece playing.

This mod TRIES to hard. It tries to be creative and unique. It's like Yahtzee says: "Spinning a plate on a stick is impressive, but try spinning three plates on sticks and you'll just end up picking porcelain out of your face."

Looking forward to the visuals update though, I'll give it another shot when thats released.

I just played this yesterday.....really good
awesome....very deep storyline
creepy ending

Fascinating mod! It has tremendous display of landscape and has a great use of instrumental background music not to mention it's very mysterious. This mod is perhaps the most artistic and well made mod I've played. It's truly a master piece. I just wish some players can comprehend such beauty.

you know... i dont get past the damn house..no idea what the fuck to do ?

I really love the idea, but it has some serious flaws as a mod that's actually fun to play. Mainly, the pacing is awful: The default pre-HEV suit walking speed is way too slow for such a large, mostly empty environment, and you end up spending far to much time walking slowly towards some distant point, wishing there was a quicker way to get there. Maybe this was an intentional design choice to give the game a slow, meditative feel, but I don't think it works. The Source engine can make some very pretty environments, but we're not yet at the point where you can have a wide-open empty environment with nothing going on that looks amazing enough that a player will be content to just slowly wander through it without getting bored. The repetitive textures and crude world geometry get old fast.

The navigation could also use some work. There are a lot of areas where it's not obvious whether you can ascend a slope or get to some area from where you are, and there are spots where the player is arbitrarily blocked from going somewhere they logically should be able to access. There's a reason Valve games always put in clearly visible and believable barriers to keep the player in an area rather than just an invisible wall: when you let a player run up against the arbitrary limitations of the game world it breaks their immersion.

And finally, I don't get why the voiceover bits are randomized. The path set up for the player to follow is really fairly linear and randomizing the order of the story doesn't really seem to serve much purpose, other than maybe getting the user to play it over again to see what they missed.

I do love the idea of using the Source engine for something totally different like this, but there's some basic good game design principles that seem to have been thrown out along with the FPS tropes.

REALLY loved this mod. It's very immersive, as simplistic as the graphics are(and they're looking really great in the remake!), and very emotional and cinematic and interpretable. One of my favorite Source engine mods ever.

Looking forward to the remake and any other creations you guys release!