Just finished playing Dear Esther

[eliasfrost]

The biggest problem with this "game" is probably that it is advertised as a game (It's clearly not a game). I have only played the HL2 version many moons ago and some valuable brandwidth that got wasted and an hour of wasted time. I'm surprised that they actually made a full-fledged release of this.

Also, one thing that bugs me: If it was an experiment all along, just to the see the reaction and who's gonna buy it and who's not, then why did they create this when they could've advertised the source mod instead? It's the exact same thing, except it ain't pretty.

On the contrary I believe it clearly is a game. You start it up, create a save, load it, and progress through the world and story yourself. And I believe the full game was made because Robert Briscoe decided to do an overhaul of it, it's on the website http://dear-esther.com/?page_id=2

A game requires interactivity, this has none. Thus it's not a game. Writing and reading save files has nothing to do with it being a game, it's optional, and you don't progress through the game world in a meaningful way, it's a waste of time having to press the W button when the game clearly could have put you on rails, which it could have done, it's no difference.