Dear Esther Free Write

My first reaction while playing Dear Esther was that it was going to be exactly like Gone Home. I thought that I was going to need to be picking up objects and waiting for journal entries to come up. So, the first thing that I did was head into the abandoned house and look around. To my surprise, I wasn’t able to pick anything up, I was only allowed to walk. after a couple minutes of walking through the mountain, something similar to a journal entry from Gone Home came up. I kept on following the paths in the hopes that I was heading the right way. In the end, although I definitely enjoyed the sights more in Dear Esther, I was able to understand Gone Home’s story better. The problem I had with Dear Esther was that sometimes the “journal entries” were too far apart from each other, so sometimes I could’t quite remember the last thing he was saying. Also, the entries would just go away, you weren’t able to replay them which made it hard to piece everything together.