Dear Esther: Landmark Edition

Technically a game from 2008 that had been in development on the Source engine, the Landmark Edition is a Unity remake of an original mod. Or something. It’s so complicated that I’ve lost interest. Playing for the first half hour I saw some great visuals, which is apparently a story told in the form of letters. That sounds interesting, and the graphics do look lush, both outdoors in the Hebrides as well as in spooky caves.

In reality, all we do is walk super slow at a snail’s pace, while some mad mad is rambling on about seemingly unrelated things. It literally makes no sense: one moment he’s talking about settlers several hundred years ago, then he’s on the hard shoulder on the motorway at the Little Chef in Wolverhampton. You get the drift.

Had this not been a free offering I would have never tried it out. What lets the game down is not the madman uttering random stuff, it’s the walking speed. If we could make this about 3x faster, this could be fun (I tried Cheat Engine, but had no idea how to get Speedhack to work – what do we expect without documentation).

Verdict: leave for an occasion where every other piece of entertainment on this Earth has been explored. Check the Wikipedia article for more info.