Player Affinity writes: "I’ve repeatedly said that the greatest advantage that PC’s have over consoles is that PC gamers get to make mods for our games, and play mods made by other fans. This often leads to us having to suffering through amateurish crap, but there are also some terrific mods out there that are better than many full-fledged games. In fact, occasionally a mod team will create a product so good that they will be noticed by a professional developer and their mod will get turned into a full game. An excellent example of this is the Half Life 2 mod Dear Esther."
The Chinese Room's Dear Esther goes free on Steam to celebrate the 10th anniversary of this foundational title.
Eh.
I mean free is free, but I found this to be a boring slog.
Not to mention this remasters actually made the game look worse in multiple areas.
I did quite like their A Machine for Pigs and Everybody's Gone to the Rapture though.
On Valentine's Day a decade ago, Dear Esther went from a Source Engine mod to a full-fledged indie game, catalyzing the "walking sim" genre. How does it measure up today?
"The China-based indie games publisher Secret Mode and Brighton-based (the UK) indie games developer The Chinese Room, are today very pleased to announce that they will celebrate the tenth anniversary of "Dear Esther" by making the genre-defining 2012 narrative exploration game free to download from February 14th to February 15th via Steam." - Jonas Ek, TGG.
