The developers made beautiful landscapes. An ok story. Writing that flits about from being too flowery to decent to word association on par with a GCSE English student. These are elements of a game which could have been fine.

Dear Esther is a valid expression of games as a medium; I think the question as to whether it is only arises because the gameplay glue that should hold those previously mentioned elements together has been minimised drastically, which would probably be shocking back in 2008.

While playing, I couldn't help but think back to Metal Gear Rising - maybe the most polar opposite game to this you could find - specifically when the second phase of a boss hits and you get some dialogue as the vocals kick the fuck in and the stakes get even higher. Slightly different than slowly walking around an island. But the point is, the gameplay holds all those elements you can find in other media together and that's what elevates this medium. So by minimising the interaction with no subversion, you lose so much of what makes the medium special. You don't get an "Art Game" - it goes without saying that all games are art - if anything you reduce it's artistic merit.

Taking away pieces of a medium is valid exploration of it, but remove the interesting parts of it and play the rest straight? It's not surprising that the game is uninteresting, but the experimentation here giving an unsurprising result is the biggest sin of the whole thing. Maybe the fact that I'm talking about what gaming can be was the point of the entire game. In that case, I love that games can be this, but I just don't like, well, this.